2 minutes ago, Procus said:

Are you a friggin lawyer responding to a brief who needs to go through every single bit of detail in a post to object to its relevancy?

Get a life!!!!  😆😆

You're the one who was up past midnight bumping threads from half a year ago to reply with nonsensical gibberish, but sure, I'm the one who needs to get a life  

3 minutes ago, Procus said:

Are you a friggin lawyer responding to a brief who needs to go through every single bit of detail in a post to object to its relevancy?

Get a life!!!!  😆😆

The lesson here is for you, genius.

Maybe don't bring up posts you make on other boards, or add weird details like the twin towers standing, etc.

Yeltsin was able, if needed, to supply Clinton with beautiful Russian women and Cuban cigars...so...he had to ask...

Spoiler

 

12 minutes ago, Procus said:

Interesting point you raise.  The Chechyan rebels had a lot of bad actors, terrorists, in their group.  The U.S. turned a blind eye to the Russian crackdown and likely supported it behind the scenes.  At the time, Clinton had a bromance with Yeltsin before the blanket hatefest of Russians was plastered all over the media.  You may recall the series of apartment building bombings in Moscow in 99 that were blamed on the rebels.  So it really was a different sort of a conflict.

That being said, I believe it was @Eaglesfandan who pointed out Bill Clinton's response to China when they protested Newt Gingrich's visit to Taiwan.  I think we all would feel more comfortable with a Bill Clinton from that era in the WH than we do with the current adminstration.

Yeah, but explain Pearl Harbor.

16 minutes ago, Procus said:

Interesting point you raise.  The Chechyan rebels had a lot of bad actors, terrorists, in their group.  The U.S. turned a blind eye to the Russian crackdown and likely supported it behind the scenes.  At the time, Clinton had a bromance with Yeltsin before the blanket hatefest of Russians was plastered all over the media.  You may recall the series of apartment building bombings in Moscow in 99 that were blamed on the rebels.  So it really was a different sort of a conflict.

That being said, I believe it was @Eaglesfandan who pointed out Bill Clinton's response to China when they protested Newt Gingrich's visit to Taiwan.  I think we all would feel more comfortable with a Bill Clinton from that era in the WH than we do with the current adminstration.

Yeah the Russians bombed their own buildings and then blamed it on the Chechens. 

And then during the conflict the a chunk of Chechens were surrounded and ran out of ammo. So they bought some. From the Russians. 

Not even joking. 

13 hours ago, TEW said:

I honestly don’t understand how people are this stupid. Even many Western European countries don’t really have free speech rights. The freaking UK will arrest you for giving someone anxiety online or teaching a dog to raise its paw when you say sieg heil. And you’re going to go to China and protest the CCP?

Why in the hell would you go to freaking China and try to make a political statement? Or use drugs in Russia?

This is like the Darwin Special Olympics of international travel.

This.

I spent 3 weeks in China for my studies. It's not like going to Canada. You need apply for a visa to travel there. (2 people in my cohort were denied. One because he was Taiwanese, and the other because he was a Colonel in the US Army). We were specifically told what we could and could not do there and that we better take that ish seriously. For example you can't use Facebook in China and even looking at online porn is punishable with a 10 year prison sentence. 

I was well aware of where I was going and what I needed to do and not do. Even back then (this was 2013) I told the University I wouldn't go to Russia. China was bad enough. 

2 hours ago, we_gotta_believe said:

You're the one who was up past midnight bumping threads from half a year ago to reply with nonsensical gibberish, but sure, I'm the one who needs to get a life  

More like I need more Melatonin

1 hour ago, Bacarty2 said:

Good example, a lot of our "vacation spots" Jamaica, Cayman Islands, Etc, are now level 3 travel(meaning you shouldnt go) because of the ridiculous amount of crime, especially towards Americans. 

I took a look at the Cayman Islands travel advisory and it was COVID related. I have no doubt they've probably got some economic/crime problems as a result.

I still wouldn't feel worried going to those places if you stick to the places that "tourist hubs" because, generally, the people that live there understand their ability to feed their family is directly tied to their ability to ensure the safety of tourists and ex-pats.

There is, however, a phenomenon that's been happening for quite some time in the Caribbean, which specifically revolves around illegal immigration into the U.S. that sees massive transient populations that island hop their way to the United States. When they get to an island and run out of money they will set up huge tent cities and set out to find work to fund their next island hop or resort to piracy. Generally those areas are higher crime and you tend to want to stay away. 

I spend quite a bit of time sailing around the Leeward Islands and have seen this for myself. I've never once felt worried for my life, though. 

As China waged extensive military exercises off of Taiwan last week, a group of American defense experts in Washington was focused on their own simulation of an eventual — but for now entirely hypothetical — US-China war over the island.

The unofficial what-if game is being conducted on the fifth floor of an office building not far from the White House, and it posits a US military response to a Chinese invasion in 2026. Even though the participants bring an American perspective, they are finding that a US-Taiwan victory, if there is one, could come at a huge cost.

"The results are showing that under most — though not all — scenarios, Taiwan can repel an invasion,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where the war games are being held. "However, the cost will be very high to the Taiwanese infrastructure and economy and to US forces in the Pacific.”

In sessions that will run through September, retired US generals and Navy officers and former Pentagon officials hunch like chess players over tabletops along with analysts from the CSIS think tank. They move forces depicted as blue and red boxes and small wooden squares over maps of the Western Pacific and Taiwan. The results will be released to the public in December.

The not-necessarily-so assumption used in most of the scenarios: China invades Taiwan to force unification with the self-governed island, and the US decides to intervene heavily with its military. Also assumed but far from certain: Japan grants expanded rights to use US bases located on its territory, while stopping short of intervening directly unless Japanese land is attacked. Nuclear weapons aren’t used in the scenarios, and the weapons available are based on capabilities the nations have demonstrated or have concrete plans to deploy by 2026. 

China’s test-firing of missiles in recent days in response to US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan underscored a Chinese capability that’s already assumed in the gameplay.

In 18 of the 22 rounds of the game played to this point, Chinese missiles sink a large part of the US and Japanese surface fleet and destroy "hundreds of aircraft on the ground,” according to Cancian, a former White House defense budget analyst and retired US Marine. "However, allied air and naval counterattacks hammer the exposed Chinese amphibious and surface fleet, eventually sinking about 150 ships.”

"The reason for the high US losses is that the United States cannot conduct a systematic campaign to take down Chinese defenses before moving in close,” he said. "The United States must send forces to attack the Chinese fleet, especially the amphibious ships, before establishing air or maritime superiority,” he said. "To get a sense of the scale of the losses, in our last game iteration, the United States lost over 900 fighter/attack aircraft in a four-week conflict. That’s about half the Navy and Air Force inventory.” 

The Chinese missile force "is devastating while the inventory lasts” so US submarines and bombers with long-range missiles "are particularly important,” he said. "For the Taiwanese, anti-ship missiles are important, surface ships and aircraft less so.” Surface ships "have a hard time surviving as long as the Chinese have long-range missiles available,” Cancian said.

The game players haven’t made any estimates so far on the number of lives that would be lost or the sweeping economic impact of such a conflict between the US and China, the world’s two largest economies.

 

Taiwan’s defense capabilities are an especially important part of the calculations, because its forces would be responsible for blunting and containing Chinese landings from the south — a scenario played out in the simulation.

"The success or failure of the ground war depends entirely on the Taiwanese forces,” Cancian said. "In all game iterations so far, the Chinese could establish a beachhead but in most circumstances cannot expand it. The attrition of their amphibious fleet limits the forces they can deploy and sustain. In a few instances, the Chinese were able to hold part of the island but not conquer the entire island.”

Anti-ship missiles — US-made Harpoons and Taiwanese-made weapons that the island democracy fields — would play a large role in the early destruction of the Chinese amphibious landing force, while Taiwan’s Navy and half of its air force would be destroyed in the first days of the conflict, according to the modeling so far.

 

"Taiwan is a large island, and its army is not small,” said Eric Heginbotham, a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for International Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who’s participating in the war game. "But from a qualitative standpoint, Taiwan’s army is not at all what it should be, and we have built that into the game. The transition to an all-volunteer military has been botched, and although conscripts remain an important component, the conscripts serve only four months.”

Perhaps the most disconcerting takeaway for Washington: The high-cost sequences conducted so far aren’t even the most challenging hypotheticals.

"We have not run the most pessimistic scenarios, where China might conquer the entire island,” Cancian said.

He said the four remaining rounds of the war games will "investigate some alternative scenarios — like the US delaying its support for Taiwan, strict Japanese neutrality and a pessimistic scenario that gives China a variety of advantages.”

David Ochmanek, a Rand Corp. senior defense researcher and former US deputy assistant defense secretary, said a CSIS exercise he participated in was "well-run and credibly adjudicated.” Ochmanek, who has participated in dozens of China-US war games, both unclassified and classified, said, "It basically replicated the results of other games that I’ve played that were set in the same time epoch and used the same basic scenario.” 

The keys to "any good game are to get knowledgeable players who can faithfully and creatively simulate what their nation’s forces would do and to get adjudicators — umpires, essentially — who can credibly assess the outcomes of engagements and battles,” Ochmanek said.

War games are played frequently by governments and outside organizations worldwide. But instructions to the participants in the CSIS project say that although the Pentagon "has conducted many such war games, they are all classified. As a result, information in the public domain is extremely limited. This project will fill that gap in public knowledge and thereby encourage discussion about US force structure and policies.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-09/what-if-war-game-for-a-us-china-conflict-sees-a-heavy-toll

Believe it or not, these outcomes are an improvement over previous war games.

Unfortunately, in nearly all of them, we lose 2 super carriers. In most of them, Pearl Harbor gets hit along with Guam.

China usually sneak attacks the US, figuring if we are going to be involved anyway, they can knock out a lot of our best gear in round one.

Basically, we need a new Air Force because all of our fighters are designed for the European theater which don’t have the necessary combat range and we need much longer range/faster missiles. The Navy needs a FA-18 replacement because it’s just not survivable. The USAF/USN seem pretty confident that NGAD/FA-XX can fly by the end of the decade, but the problem is we might not have that long.

The other problem seems to be lawmakers/the public’s inability to realize that what you start with is what you get. This won’t be like WW2 where we get to build up arms. 

 

Are these the same people that thought Russia could over run NATO in a week?

10 minutes ago, Joe Shades 73 said:

Are these the same people that thought Russia could over run NATO in a week?

Our own generals and military officers? Yes.

On 8/11/2022 at 4:03 PM, Joe Shades 73 said:

Are these the same people that thought Russia could over run NATO in a week?

 

On 8/3/2022 at 1:45 PM, barho said:

And that would be a miscalculation.  There is a reason the US puts it at 2027.  They won’t be anywhere near ready till then.

Apparently that timeline was bumped up to between 12-24 months by the DoD.

Bass is on an advisory board to the Department of Defense, fyi.

Good financial/economic insight by Bass as always. Of course, Bass is one of the biggest China hawks out there, and like anyone who gives public opinions, he’s been wrong before. But I really think people aren’t handicapping this risk properly:

Bass thinks it’s "likely” we get in a hot war with China. Doesn’t think we risk a carrier, but will pull the plug on SWIFT and attempt to destroy them through finance and trade. Thinks it’s better to publicize it as a public policy to use as deterrence.

3 hours ago, TEW said:

 

Apparently that timeline was bumped up to between 12-24 months by the DoD.

Bass is on an advisory board to the Department of Defense, fyi.

Good financial/economic insight by Bass as always. Of course, Bass is one of the biggest China hawks out there, and like anyone who gives public opinions, he’s been wrong before. But I really think people aren’t handicapping this risk properly:

Bass thinks it’s "likely” we get in a hot war with China. Doesn’t think we risk a carrier, but will pull the plug on SWIFT and attempt to destroy them through finance and trade. Thinks it’s better to publicize it as a public policy to use as deterrence.

I mean…he’s doing what he always does - talking his book. I love the guy as a friend, but you can’t take him that seriously. 

56 minutes ago, vikas83 said:

I mean…he’s doing what he always does - talking his book. I love the guy as a friend, but you can’t take him that seriously. 

He isn’t the only guy I’ve heard the timeline getting moving up from…

 

This Saddam back in day. 

 

 

 

 

50 minutes ago, DaEagles4Life said:

 

 

Tech stocks in China down 20% yesterday with the Xi news. Alibaba and Tencent look dirt cheap. 

35 minutes ago, Blazehound said:

Tech stocks in China down 20% yesterday with the Xi news. Alibaba and Tencent look dirt cheap. 

LOL @ the idea of property rights in China.

 

 

Who knew he was a Chinese spy?

Gonna go over the rust belt and people for sure going to try to shoot it down

18 minutes ago, DaEagles4Life said:

Gonna go over the rust belt and people for sure going to try to shoot it down

Good luck. That thing is above commerical airspace, so it's several miles up there.