China can wait. The Army’s focus should be Europe.

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some random thoughts:

there is an element in warsaw that is happy to regain its lost territories in the east, i.e. the kresy.

beware of demonizing putin too much, if he disappears you may truly fear whoever/whatever follows.

look at our shipyard capacity, our merchant marine, the level of our physical toughness and mechanical literacy.

look at production timelines and cost overruns of our weapons procurement.

explain to me the quality of our decisions in iraq, afghanistan, libya, syria by many of the same people still in dc.

research the bretton woods accord and the significance of the petrodollar.

look into “civil society” u.s. foreign aid programs, then flip the narrative to imagine the u.s. as the target of a “color revolution.”

consider who has made alot of money in the ukraine. and from china.

look into china’s “nine dash line” in southeast asian waters.

don’t expect to find much analysis of these issues in the msm, so suggest that you cut the cable tv cord.
 
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Succinctly. Honest and integrity in leadership. Prioritize realistic actionable tasks that legitimately secure the USA.

The response to 9/11/01. I was 22 years younger, and naïve. We were attacked by ~19 Saudi non-state actors yet invaded Afghanistan and occupied it for 20 years, at about the 1/2 way point found Osama taking refuge in our "ally" Pakistan which did not want to turn him over and punished the informant who alerted us. OEF was a complete disaster. We also re-invaded Iraq, which I was for at the time, but it was largely predicated on - to be very generous - bad intelligence. I think the mission was noble to a degree, we were under ceasefire agreements with Iraq and they were in violation for a decade; but the execution was abysmal. We accomplished really no sustaining objectives in either nation after all those deaths, years and money. What we SHOULD have instead done, was some strategic targeted aerial strikes from afar on key leaders, over time. And given these were immigrants we should have hardened our immigration and borders against infiltration (something we STILL have not accomplished 23 years later). Instead we expanded the US police state, groping and spying on Americans.

Ukraine. Not our fight. Stay out. We agreed to 30 years ago. Monitor from afar, offer humanitarian assistance, food, medical.

Taiwan: Not our fight. Build our own chip manufacturing in the US, which would benefit us ultimately.

Modern powerful China is our own creation. We opened up trade, helped fund their infrastructure thru foreign investments and sent manufacturing jobs there so the elite class in the US could get richer and the poor get more poor. NAFTA and TAFTA have gutted the US and built up China. Our lust for cheap junk also props that up. This strategy which started in the early 1990s was a large error. China has stolen endless technology from us. China has also been allowed to infiltrate the US, learn in our universities, infiltrate government, buy land, etc. All of this has been bad strategic blunders. We start by evicting China, divorcing from needing their trade, and restoring the US as a dominant manufacturing nation.

The rest of the world, stop meddling in their internal affairs. Examples. Somalia. Lebanon. Benghazi. Beirut. Jordan. Syria. ETC. ETC. ETC.

My overarching concern is with each of these heavy-handed actions the US becomes less relevant, less dominant, and our currencies less powerful. China hasn't fired a shot in decades, and look how powerful China is. They don't need all of these hundreds of military bases around the world, bullying nations, etc. They build stuff and trade and are quite powerful.

To be clear, Russia and China are both totally evil. I am not a fan of either. But they are winning.
I guess I’m not surprised, but I agree with all your answers. It’s been far too long since we’ve strengthened America from within. I am sick and tired of supporting foreign nations at America’s expense. Even our so called friends need to defend their own interests, even if that means they have to die trying.

Scott
 
Russia is a declining power and has been for decades. In contrast, China is on a winning trajectory. They correctly understand that “modern warfare” is obsolete and have instead pursued a new form of warfare.

Remove the industrial base of your adversaries and plant the seeds of discontent within the societies of your adversaries. A good example of this is the “slack off on Mondays” or “quiet quitting” messages on TicTok. Messages like these, most certainly originated by Chinese agents, are intended to undermine the productivity of the American worker.

The Chinese plan is working and they will prevail. Perhaps one of the ironies will be that they will eventually swallow up Russia just like they did America and the rest of the western world. And the Russians will hate it. Hilarious.

Scott
Kinda like livin' on a fault line eh?
 
Kinda like livin' on a fault line eh?
I was 30 floors up in San Francisco in the financial district when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit. We weren’t worried about the earth swallowing us up. We were worried about the high rise falling over sideways like a tree blowing over in the wind. I can honestly say all of us thought we were going to die. Let me tell you, it’s quite a head rush thinking you’re just seconds from death.

Scott
 
I was 30 floors up in San Francisco in the financial district when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit. We weren’t worried about the earth swallowing us up. We were worried about the high rise falling over sideways like a tree blowing over in the wind. I can honestly say all of us thought we were going to die. Let me tell you, it’s quite a head rush thinking you’re just seconds from death.

Scott
I was thinking of the Doobie Brothers album cover when I posted.
Americans are always the first on site when natural disasters strike.
 
I wonder how much longer war In Ukraine will last ?
My gut feeling is it would be like another Vietnam, Afghan, or Iraq, which means, probably 20 years. It would be a withdrawal due to the exhaustion of logistics and finance instead of military power. The real Ukraine war is on the financial front. You can only collapse a nuclear power with financial collapse, and to do that you have to be healthy first before going into a financial hunger strike against the other side.

I think, the winner out of Ukraine war is India (and second to India, China). India being a former colony has no reason to support the Europeans fighting each other, they would be happy to grow their own economy with cheap oil and natural resources while their former suppressors beat each other up.

US, no matter what happen, wouldn't collapse into a 3rd world country, I don't see NATO and Russia enter a nuclear MAD. The main concern for US would be turning itself into another Canada (same quality of life but no more global influence), or UK (holding on to its former glory in name only but no more real influence across the globe). Who would replace US if we lost our world police status? Japan? China? Australia? I don't know.
 
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And let's not forget, one of the primary reasons for America's possible collapse is because it protected large parts of the world, nations that were unwilling to pay for it themselves. These freeloader nations will be the first to fall.

Scott
You can think of it that way, or you can think of it as they ally with the US so US can use their locations for a bigger influence (dollar, military presence, trade, etc). If all you want is them paying for everything (aka fair share), they may say no and then you have no way of using their ports or nearby ocean / water, and they may turn to your enemy for "protection" and a better deal.

Example: Turkey
 
not shipbuilding. not undersea warfare. not training. not sealift. not maintenance. not manning. not…whatever. but this: https://www.frontpagemag.com/as-china-war-looms-navys-priority-is-going-green/#comments

i bet that half the country is apathetically clueless. many others wouldn’t argue this point. many others would think it to be a reasonable idea.

i cannot be convinced that we wouldn’t have our collective lunch eaten at the gate in a hot war with russia or china. i’m not predicting the ultimate victor at any cost. think of our first six months of ww2 following pearl harbor. think of the tremendous loss of allied men and material. think of the loss of so much territory. think of the changes in the world ensuing from the loss of western colonial dominions. think of the american industrial might that quickly came into play. think of the american shipyards and workers repairing damaged vessels in a few weeks. think of the immense suffering of allied prisoners, interned civilians and captive peoples. think of the heartache of american families back home. think of fighting without air superiority. think of seeing nightime fires from torpedoed merchant vessels off the east coast, and seeing bodies of dead mariners washed up on the beach the next day. think of the natural, human, economic, industrial and emotional resources that were on tap to be drawn upon in the second six months after pearl harbor. do we have it in us to do a repeat now? are we sure that all of the results will be to our pleasure?

don’t leave the echo chamber. don’t ask where is hunter biden. don’t turn off cable tv. don’t wonder we we aren’t trying to find peace that respects all diverse ethnicities in the ukraine. don’t ever miss a chance to poke bears. don’t demand audits of our help. don’t walk in the other guy’s shoes to learn the 360 degrees of a situation. don’t ask for audits of the past decisions of our 2023 rulers.

and whatever you do, don’t go into a cpo mess and ask for the true state of our navy.
 
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I FULLY acknowledge the purpose and reason behind MAD, and accept that we would strike them back, killing tens of millions of Russians. While we suffer and die too. If that gives folks comfort, so be it. But it's like being in a gunfight were you get shot and die, but you got them too. There is no winner in such a scenario. We all lose, badly.

I'd live very, very much that we don't engage in any of such things. The thought of the foolishness of superpowers destroying the globe and every creation on it, over this pettiness, is a great burden IMO.

One point of order, however, is that unlike the US which has invested nothing in civilian sustainability, underground bunkers, etc. for the masses, Russia has invested heavily in underground bunkers and survivability. So we in the US would take the greater beating in an exchange, for whatever that is worth. Are you aware of any practical civilian bunker networks in the US? I'm not.

I doubt the earth will be viable to sustain human life after such an exchange, certainly not in the northern hemisphere. It won't be just the 2 belligerents that suffer the following nuclear winter (for years). The result is similar to what killed the dinosaurs
 
I guess I’m not surprised, but I agree with all your answers. It’s been far too long since we’ve strengthened America from within. I am sick and tired of supporting foreign nations at America’s expense. Even our so called friends need to defend their own interests, even if that means they have to die trying.

Scott

Don't forget the US wealth comes from those "friends". Spheres of influence means market and foreign currency. That's what it's all about. And what China excelled at at for decades now. It's not one big rice field anymore, is it? The soviet union never had huge markets outside it's borders, neither did russia. Arms deals were the exception.

Once you lose those markets, you get poorer as a country, and you lose any influence you have on their policies. Coca-cola, levis, IBM, apple and the likes. They all depended on foreign markets to make America big.
 
don’t ask where is hunter biden. don’t turn off cable tv
This pretty much summarizes a lot of this movement. They hate the current administration so much they want the US to fail, and think Putin is their friend.

The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend. Its completely possible that you have many enemies, who are also enemies. The average American worker has enemies they don't even know about.
 
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