* The US economy and industrial power is dependent on IT and brittle supply chains. Nobody knows how much the cyber infrastructure holding this up is already compromised.
* Russian S-400s can already deny air superiority to Israeli planes, which are not far behind US planes.
* How does the US have space superiority when there is no ASAT defense besides MAD?
* The US has not been able to suppress a rebellion in Afghanistan with trillions of dollars and 17 years. Maybe in an actual war their hands would be untied, so this isn't the best point.
* The US Navy loses war-games to swarm attacks and is just now a decade later deploying solutions to this. When was the last time US ships actually had to fight? Vietnam?
* The US has increasing ethnic and social conflicts, not to mention the potential fifth column of residents with ties to enemy powers.
* Barely half of US fighter planes are combat ready at any given moment. The trillion dollar F-35 had to be flown with VFR the first time it crossed the IDL. Who knows what else is lurking in that software?
That said - * The S-400 is an impressive system. The Russians have so built ~300 of them, and like any system, the soft factors are more important than the paper facts suggest. Training, deployment, doctrine, and strategic/tactical goals would greatly affect the viability of it on any modern battlefield.
* Space Superiority is more than just ASAT capabilities, but its an area that few other countries have ever even attempted, and with the US's dominance in rocket technology (arguably anyway) and high altitude laser platforms, I'm fairly confident it would be a stalemate at best, with even the closest competitor. I would agree its an area of US defense that will need special attention over the next ~10 years.
* Insurgency =/= Great War.
* OIF was heavily supported by carrier based aircraft, and there are exactly zero countries that posses a modern enough navel force to threaten US control of the actual blue water areas. US Submarine technology is decades ahead of everyone else at this point. There are concern developments in this area, but again, we're talking "Great War"
* True point. Wars tend to get people pointed in the same direction though. Especially "Great Wars"
* US pilots put in more seat time than every other country combined. This is a factor that cannot be overstated. Putting 10x the number of the worlds best plane in the air means nothing if the actual operator cannot leverage those tools effectively.
In the end, these are all great points as to why the US has room to improve its lead, but none of them really address the core point which is that the US is currently the undisputed leader in almost every military category, and any "Great War" involving the US would be a very lopsided affair. You're more than welcome to pick your challenger and we can see how long it takes me to make a list twice as long with their problems, although I can't guarantee I'll actually spend the time doing that today :)
Yes, the initial superiority of one military is greater by a large margin and will remain that way for some time to come. But I think it's misleading wording to say it "has room to improve its lead", simply due to the fact that emerging powers are improving a greater rate, and it's economically unreasonable to believe otherwise.
Plus, no individual actor made the decision to plunge their mighty military power into the conflagration that became WWI.
I keep reading articles on the argument that carriers CAN be sunk. One article argued that only a nuclear attack could do it, but its argument was unsubstantiated. Swarm tactics and drone warfare are emerging game-changers in conventional warfare. More than anything, initial phases of WWIII would be missile warfare. Carrier groups can defend against hypersonic, but cannot do so reliably.
Combine this with a risky false impression - that war could be contained regionally. Would the symbolism of sinking a carrier be enough to have the U.S. back out of the contested East Asian theaters?
I can't answer that question, and it worries me that I can't. If the answer was certain either way, war would be less likely. As it stands, I could see certain gambles being both plausible, and terrifyingly dangerous.
That's a very civil way to frame an otherwise bona fide flamewar topic, without ruining it :)
"no individual actor made the decision
to plunge their mighty military power
into the conflagration"
The big wars were really a form of violent economic panic, writ large, and without descalation channels, partly as a component of monarchy, divine right and authoritarian autocracy, but also horrendously aggrivated by profound leaps of technological power, mostly by way of chemistry and industrial scale production of chemicals.
No one knew it would get that bad, that fast, that way. And during a time when royalty simply would not back down from a fight.
There are hot spots and proxy wars right now. If they go sideways, and spill a hot mess in the wrong lap, could an uncontrolled panic open up and let loose a new kind of conflagration we weren't expecting or have never before considered?
That's probably the hardest riddle. How does one anticipate an unexpected, unplanned atrocity?
I think anyone who thinks that inflicting a sharp defeat on the US in the pacific would crush public morale and push it into a negotiated peace would have to be a very poor student of history.
Additionally, the strongest carrier defense against weapons such as this is the size of the ocean, and their short(ish) range. You can't hit what you can't find, and/or what you can't get close too.
This would depend squarely on the context and circumstances. Historical precedents are of little to no relevance here.
Turn the military loose and Afghanistan will resemble a parking lot full of very submissive people.
Soldiers in combat have tighter rules of engagement with the enemy than US Police force have to follow when interacting with citizens. Let that sink in.
That said, during those rare moments of clarity on the Afghan battlefield, there was zero doubt with respect to the outcome.
The S-400 is, like all major Russian weapon systems, an enigma. In the past, the Russian were capable of producing some excellent weapon systems, but they've also been very capable of inflating the capabilities of some real stinkers. The Mig 25 Foxbat comes to mind for example. All of my attempts to find real, verified information on S-400 capabilities have only turned up marketing material and articles quoting the marketing material. There have been no usages of the S-400 system in combat conditions that I am aware of.
It seems the S-400 should be taken seriously, but overestimation can be as dangerous as underestimation. It is possible that the S-400 is simply a rehash of the S-300 system with some of the interceptors having larger motors with longer range. This would still make it a potent system but one with known counters.
Also, FWIW under every circumstance that isn't some kind of military invasion phantasy porn I generally look less positively on our relationship with guns.
[1]http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/T-Briefing-Pap...
I can't imagine the "Red Dawn" scenario of Russian troops invading and occupying US territory. If anything, the goal would be to knock out critical communication/shipping infrastructure to effectively disrupt all normal activity--can't buy or sell, can't get food, can't depend on modern mass communication to organize and maintain order.
Alongside that, the use of modern weapons to do serious damage to centers of power would speed up collapse. That's the goal if your intention is to hit us at our weakest point: catastrophic societal collapse.
If it's our military against some other military, we've got odds as good as anyone else (and almost always better). But if you've knocked out electronic commerce, disrupted civilian use of things like cell networks and internet access, and made it hard enough to get food on supermarket shelves, all those armed people aren't gonna just keep calm and carry on while they're hungry and several cities are burning.
Sure, it's probably a bit too "straight-to-Netflix" but it's much easier for me to imagine someone applying force at the points we're weakest and letting things fall apart than facing off plane vs. plane, ship vs. ship, and tank vs. tank on the battlefield.
But in rural areas, people would just plant a bigger garden and slaughter an extra hog or cow and dip into the canned food in the cellar. They'd also load their empty shells and sharpen their rifle skills.
When it comes to zombie attacks pointy sticks seem pretty effective anyway.
As much as I enjoyed the early seasons, I understand that it was always the goal of the original author and the showrunners to make it more about people being people in extreme circumstances. If it was decades earlier it could just as easily have gone the Fallout route and used nuclear war/radioactive hazards/mutants/etc. as the backdrop and the stories could have stayed 95% the same.
I watched a few of season 2's episodes, but gave up pretty quickly.
The problem is that, even with 393 millions of guns, USA can't stop recurrent fireforests year after year. And this is only an example. Would be naive to think that, as people have a pistol, can't be killed remotely from a million Km of distance. The idea of a foreign army marching in a country and killing people one by one like stormtroopers, is very outdated.
And of course you can always distroy critical areas and then sit and look how the civilians start killing other civilians for water or food. With so many weapons in the table would be even much faster. Is hardly a guarantee.
Not exactly true.
The problem is that nobody wants to pay the money to do so--especially the people who live in those areas.
In addition, you only get to burn those forests once. After that, they are no longer a threat because there is no fuel.
Not necessarily. I bet that the new replacement ecosystem will be, in fact, much more flammable. The water has quit the area.
You simply can't burn a forest to the ground twice without growing another forrest in between.
I was not able to find any sources corroborating that story. Are you confusing it with the F-22?
1988 Operation Praying Mantis [0] during the Tanker War in the Iran-Iraq war. Iran deployed swarm attacks, but only at a small scale. Which was one of the largest US naval battles after WW2.
The US Air Force simply doesn't use it's full fleet at any given moment:
"For example, in 1969, 523 USAF fighter aircraft were deployed to Vietnam or Thailand, only 14 percent of the 3,838 fighters in the USAF inventory that year." [1]
1. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/..., p.20
If you ever get the chance to read old declassified nuclear attack plans against a city, you will see the same. A single nuclear weapon ... just doesn't do it. Those plans involve starting out with something like 10 nuclear explosions (not even directly against the city itself, rather on supporting infrastructure), and then one more every hour or so for 48 hours or even weeks (these plans are/were made for most large cities, and even for US cities where the likely plans for Russian nuclear attacks are created by US to allow for better preparations).
In some ways what you see in the first episode of Battlestar Galactica is somewhat accurate. First, dozens of nuclear explosions make an effective response impossible (e.g. military installations, runways, important bridges, train lines, communication, ...), then a methodical "sweep" with nuclear explosions of the entire city. This cannot be done with one, or even 10, nuclear bombs.
And even pretty bad radar systems can tell the difference between one and tens/hundreds of rockets.
So whilst this is a concern, it can and is eliminated with proper infrastructure and planning.
There will not be information asymmetry once a nuclear attack actually starts happening.
Apparently there are backup systems in both countries that will fire nuclear weapons automatically (!) at predefined targets if certain cities are hit with nuclear attacks - e.g. Washington, Moscow, etc.
That's why deterrence is effective - because any strike can automatically lead to hundreds of millions of people dying (and, if the modelling of nuclear winter is correct, potentially pretty much all large mammals within a few years)...
Keep in mind that Stuxnet is generally figured to be a joint American/Israeli cyberweapon.
[1] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/swedens-super-ste... (and many other similar articles elsewhere)
As of now the US have the greatest army, but if let’s say China were to prepare for it for enough time in a somewhat stealthy way, couldn’t it bring the USA into a long and dirty foght ?
Well, this is one of the reasons a Great War is unlikely - how are you going to do this? Even if you build things up slowly, you still have to store them somewhere. You have to train people. There is no way to create a military force capable of fighting a Great War in today's age without it being obvious.
Which isn't to say that build up can't happen - it's just not going to be a surprise to anyone.
Trained via software updates and built under the guise of something innocent like 'gardener bots'
Force extended requires significant amplification.
So for China to impact us in a meaningful way they would have to somehow sneak a force large enough to damage across a pretty wide open space, then maintain that logistically.
Ditto for the RU
That said once in the US you have 300 million small arms manned by 21+ million veterans in the US
Not sure China can actually get that many boots on the US soil before the Navy / Air get a poke or two at them
Russia is only 55 miles from the US.
I'd also suggest the last time countries were so dominant in certain military areas, they didn't overlap as much as they do today, so open conflict was easier to maintain. In the early 1800's France was the undisputed world leader when it came to land based combat, while the British maintained a serious advantage at sea. Today, the US is undisputed in all 3 categories, land, air, sea, and a 4th if you count space. If another country were able to take a commanding lead in at least 1 of those areas, perhaps we could see a high intensity conflict involving the US, however until that happens, there isn't much of a point.
Minor Edit: This isn't intended as support of the current situation.