skb12172 wrote:Well, that's just great. A perfect time fir us to piss off Russia and China by dicking around with Syria and NorK.
What in the blue hell does China have to do with anything?
I want to clarify something, in all my ranting of the criminal mismanagement of the US military post-9/11. Make no mistake: We are still the hardest motherfuckers the world has ever seen.
Russia's military is a joke. They're entirely reliant on conscripts, drug addiction is a huge problem, their NCO corps is virtually non-existent, their officers are doing it to check a box. Their little buffer zone trip into Ukraine has cost them dearly. Not in terms of military losses, but in faith with leadership in a military where precious little existed to begin with. If you're a Russian soldier and die fighting for a chunk of Ukraine, your death is written off as a training accident, which means your family is not entitled to the compensation they would receive if you'd suffered a combat death. Putin is a corrupt despot yearning for the glory days of the Soviet Union and he is living on borrowed time. Economically, they need the West far more than the West needs them.
I've
mentioned before that Russia's found out the hard way that the whole "air expeditionary force" model isn't as easy as we make it look. Don't forget, please, that they are operating in an essentially permissive airspace to conduct airstrikes on hospitals. At our worst, we handily outperform their best. We already have more combat-ready F-35s than Russia has PAK-FAs
planned. And their
Navy really isn't in much better shape.
Seriously, if we had to draw a line in a sand with Russia and showed we were serious, either Russia would fold and fold hard, or their military would set mass desertion records and
then they'd fold.
China's role in the middle east is non-existent. They are not going to go to bat for North Korea, either. If Kim Jong Whoever's-Not-Murdered decides that he's going to fuck up South Korea, he will, and he will reap the whirlwind while China looks the other way while rocking on their collective feet and whistling. They
need us, they don't need North Korea for anything but Communist lip service, and they've been tired of footing that bill for a long time. The only thing China really uses the DPRK for anymore is a source of cheap labor. No; if we were to get into a pissing contest with China, it would be over Africa, which they are using as a bread basket.
Our military is, essentially, a mighty giant who's overworked and needs to have some suspicious lumps looked at. He's still the biggest, toughest bastard in the room but unless some serious issues are addressed, there is absolutely no guarantee things will stay that way.