US Military Power - 2021

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Jackson_Slugger said:
Here's the hard truth, and this will be my last post in this thread:

We didn't "lose" Afghanistan in 2020 with a **** treaty. We didn't lose it in 2021 with a chaotic and rapid "Dunkirk" retreat, nor in 2003 when we forgot all about them because invading Iraq became the national obsession and they were second hand news.

We lost it in 1992-93 when we could have truly "nation-built" after the Soviets left and the Kabul communist gov't collapsed simply by sending aid and advisors that would have been welcome at that time, with minimal investment and no combat deaths. But we cut all aid and lost interest after the Red Army left and watched them devolve into civil war with a corrupt collection of pederast warlords leading to the rise of the Taliban and the Northern Alliance...

Rinse and repeat...
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I think you mean 1980s.
While true, and I think you mean in the 1980s a decade before, it was an irrelevant rock with irrelevant 3rd world people and it would have been impossible to believe in 20 years later we'd suffer 9/11/01. Nobody could have foreseen that. So an investment there would have been laughed out of the Congress. May as well pick some other 3rd world spot and dump money in today claiming it's important.

I cannot fault people in 1985 for not having crystal balls. They managed based on then-known threats and information.
 
The Soviets withdrew in 1989. But unlike our Kabul gov't the communist regime held out for a couple years without Red Army ground troops. The actual civil war that erupted after was in the early 1990's....
 
I just read that we're going to give the Taly-bon our "old" Navy warships and Air Force fighter jets, so we can build new ones. They'll be getting a trillion dollars in early 2000 technology to compliment their recently acquired $85 billion in state of the art helicopters, NVGs, explosives, body armor, and small arms... lol.
 
CharlesInCharge said:
I just read that we're going to give the Taly-bon our "old" Navy warships and Air Force fighter jets, so we can build new ones. They'll be getting a trillion dollars in early 2000 technology to compliment their recently acquired $85 billion in state of the art helicopters, NVGs, explosives, body armor, and small arms... lol.
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$83 billion is the overall aid number from the early 2000's until this year, and not what they inherited. It's not a hugely impressive number actually. I think the Pentagon spends that in coffee for the same period. But it's okay, we still have their gold and currency reserves. The small arms and other stuff will work, but they had plenty of that already from the ISI. The state of the art choppers are more or less done and will be useless in a few months if not now with a few exceptions. Someone said Iran, but probably the high tech stuff might go to Pakistan, our ally and the Taliban's biggest benefactor...

"Goatherders" indeed...
 
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As I age I started to realize one thing: technical competitive advantage can be learned over time, you can never safeguard trade secret forever. However the amount of resources you spend will also determines the logistic capability, and logistic capability is what decide in the long term who wins and who loses. So this is no surprise that we spend >50% of the world's military budget, which means in terms of financial spending we can win the whole world fighting against us together, alone.

On the other hand, what would you do if your competitors decided to cut their spending? You probably would think it make sense you also cut your spending. What if you are the vendor in such industry? You naturally do not want to be out of business, and would try your best to expand the market. This is why tobacco and alcohol has continuous marketing for new customers (teenagers), and this is why we realize it is time to ban these tobacco and alcohol marketing to the teens.

I think you know where I'm getting to, I'll stop here without going political.
 
Jackson_Slugger said:
Here's the hard truth, and this will be my last post in this thread:

We didn't "lose" Afghanistan in 2020 with a **** treaty. We didn't lose it in 2021 with a chaotic and rapid "Dunkirk" retreat, nor in 2003 when we forgot all about them because invading Iraq became the national obsession and they were second hand news.

We lost it in 1992-93 when we could have truly "nation-built" after the Soviets left and the Kabul communist gov't collapsed simply by sending aid and advisors that would have been welcome at that time, with minimal investment and no combat deaths. But we cut all aid and lost interest after the Red Army left and watched them devolve into civil war with a corrupt collection of pederast warlords leading to the rise of the Taliban and the Northern Alliance...

Rinse and repeat...
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To be fair. Viet Cong eventually turn into who they are today (a mini China, or mini Taiwan) after being in poverty and 3rd world for so long. It didn't turn into Afghan of the last 20 years. Being unemployed sucks, no matter who you are, what religion you have, your skin color, your diet, your ideology, etc. Eventually the poor and unemployed will do the right thing either overthrow their own government or their government will finally do something to make things better.

Viet Cong is now on track to be the next Taiwan. They will get there in 30 years.
 
Jackson_Slugger said:
We would defend Taiwan, for the near term anyways. They are the single largest manufacturer of chips afterall. For the long term, IDK. But they would be no easy pickin's for the PLA...
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I think you have it backward.

They becomes the biggest chip maker in the world as the commitment, that the world economy has skin in the game to defend them. China's contract manufacturer industry goes through Taiwanese companies and their management, also because they want competing commitment, that Chinese economy has skin in the game to play nice with them, and they need to play nice to both China and the rest of the world as well.

I remember reading a news article that mention where TSMC get their fab funding from, a huge part of it being the World Bank (that one), and a few other local Taiwanese banks, and of course their government.
 
PandaBear said:
If I have an airplane and no pilot, I would probably trade it in for a car. Make sense.
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If I have an airplane....or an M16 (machine gun)....a missile... a Humvee...etc....I don't leave it for my ENEMY to use or benefit from. I don't understand how any sane person can defend the INEPTITUDE of our departure 'plan' from Afghanistan.....
 
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CharlesInCharge said:
While true, and I think you mean in the 1980s a decade before, it was an irrelevant rock with irrelevant 3rd world people and it would have been impossible to believe in 20 years later we'd suffer 9/11/01. Nobody could have foreseen that.
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It wasn't 'impossible to believe' ....there were men with vision who knew of the threat and were prepared ('Google' Rick Rescorla)....We just didn't have enough 'visionaries' in our government
service. The FBI was told that Islamic men were taking 'flight training' but had no interest in learning how to land the plane....the FBI had prior info on other things that they blew....like the massacre at Marjorie Stoneham Dougless high school and much more*....The sad thing is that 'failure' seems to be accepted in many areas of our 'government'.

* No offense to the brave men and woman of the FBI....it's the 'leadership' that's responsible for their failings....but that's what happens when non-elected 'leaders' become too 'political'..
 
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CharlesInCharge said:
Weird. I'm seeing endless pictures and videos of Taly-bon carrying M4s, driving out vehicles and flying our Blackhawks around, now occupying our billion dollar buildings, pictures of them wearing clearly US issued Night Vision Goggles (sensitive items, controlled items), body armor, camoflage, US issued weapons, vehicles, other obviously US issued equipment, and so forth. What was "demilitarized" precisely. ??? You mean we didn't hand over anti-aircraft surface to air missiles like what is reported? I would certainly hope not. But given this unfolding it seems we probably did.

Oh, what about the biometrics and computers we apparently left behind, with names and biometrics on our allies. Oops.
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Yes the items we gave to Afghan military 300k that surrendered and in turn Taliban has it.
 
pbm said:
It wasn't 'impossible to believe' ....there were men with vision who knew of the threat and were prepared ('Google' Rick Rescorla)....We just didn't have enough 'visionaries' in our government
service. The FBI was told that Islamic men were taking 'flight training' but had no interest in learning how to land the plane....the FBI had prior info on other things that they blew....like the massacre at Marjorie Stoneham Dougless high school and much more*....The sad thing is that 'failure' seems to be accepted in many areas of our 'government'.

* No offense to the brave men and woman of the FBI....it's the 'leadership' that's responsible for their failings....but that's what happens when non-elected 'leaders' become too 'political'..
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To clarify my point, which I thought was already quite clear, it's not hard to concoct all manner of plausible scenarios of terrorism. True story, I remember when I was very very young grade school age, way before 9/11, all on my own I wondered why a terrorist doesn't steal a plane and crash it into the statue of liberty to attack us. Mind you, I was in grade school when I thought of this all on my own in the early 1980s. I would certainly hope leaders in government intelligence had considered such obvious attack plans. Turns out, we were caught very flat footed.

Back on point, the cold war was brewing in the 1980s. We just lost Vietnam to communists. Threat of nuclear war was quite high. Global human extermination event with Russia as the #1 enemy. We greatly aided the losing Taly-bon defeat and repell the Ruskies. Having just helped the Taly-bon do so, in the 80s and 90s with the collapse of the USSR, swiftly and soundly beating Saddam in 91, and the massive prosperity in the US due to the .com bubble, it's easy to see why there was some lax behavior thinking we were invincible economically and militarily. This might explain some lax attitudes, and the "impossible to believe" attack on 9/11/01, now almost 20 years in the rear view mirror. We have to transport ourselves to the late 1990s when people were earning money hand over fist in the markets and the world seemed relatively safe. Why would the Taly-bon and Alqueda attack us? To the average American is seemed so implausible that people who lived such rudamentary lives could pull off the worst - the worst - attack in history akin to Pearl Harbor.
 
Doc8404 said:
an M16 is not a machine gun.
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Yes...'machine gun' was a poor choice of words....I've fired an M16 many times so I know what it is and what it's capabilities are....If our exit from Afghanistan was better planned and executed...instead of the 'clusterf**k' that it was...we'd be much better off and less humiliated on the world stage.

Here's excerpts from the July 2021 phone call between our President and the Afghan President where LYING was encouraged:

BIDEN: You know, I am a moment late. But I mean it sincerely. Hey look, I want to make it clear that I am not a military man any more than you are, but I have been meeting with our Pentagon folks, and our national security people, as you have with ours and yours, and as you know and I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things aren’t going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban. And there’s a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.


https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-...s-medical-supplies-not-overpriced-2021-09-02/
https://www.reuters.com/world/excerpts-call-between-joe-biden-ashraf-ghani-july-23-2021-08-31/

Isn't it strange that our media is far less interested in talking about this phone call than the one between the former US President and the President of Ukraine....I wonder why?
 
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Leaving gear behind when bases shut down isn't anything new really. All of this is nothing more than a lack of integrity and dignity from up the chain of command.

Meanwhile Lcpl Schmuckatelli loses a PEQ-15 and the entire battalion shuts down and searches for it.
 
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Pew said:
Leaving gear behind when bases shut down isn't anything new really. All of this is nothing more than a lack of integrity and dignity from up the chain of command.

Meanwhile Lcpl Schmuckatelli loses a PEQ-15 and the entire battalion shuts down and searches for it.
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Have you ever been in a company that was circling around bankruptcy and then suddenly it happens one day?

There were competing management goals of trying to keep it afloat and keep people working to buy time, they still need their computers to work with. Then there's the goal of keeping people employed just in case they survive and still have computers to work with.

Finally when the time is up the landlord shut the door, you got evicted from the office, your electricity cut, your janitor stopped coming and you run out of toilet paper.

Do you think you have time to eBay all the computers at the last minute? I sure don't. How about selling your company to another company and you have to merge and layoff some of the people? Do you have time to deal with all of their used computers and clean up their cubes? I bet you won't have time for that.

A few hummers and M16, a couple helicopters, are just candy wrappers (let's say it is worth 100M) in the grand scheme of things (2T worth). Without logistics the higher end stuff will be useless pretty quickly.

What are you going to do when you are late on office rent? Do you spend your time installing windows update? What are you going to do when you have an evacuation? You don't prioritize moving weapons and leave people behind, you also don't do oil change like you normally would have done.
 
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