“You spend a lot, but you get the best!” sounds a lot better than “You spend a lot, but we still suck!”
This argument doesn't make any sense. The US military is better than the next top three militaries combined. The Ukraine war is showing the superiority of decades old Western tech.
The US military might be better than the rest, but they were still defeated by poor people in the desert with some Casio watches and decades' old AKs.
Similarly, it seems that small drones are another potential avenue of exploitation in asymmetric warfare.
Partially due to institutional experience and economies of scale (for certain capabilities). We probably still exceed what the next top 3 powers (China, Russia, India, BTW) are spending in PPP terms, so it shouldn't be that surprising.
> The Ukraine war is showing the superiority of decades old Western tech.
For every video of HIMARS blowing up a Russian ammo depot, there's a video of Ka-52 helicopters popping M2 Bradleys from 5+ km away.[1] M777s were lauded for their accuracy....until they broke. [2] Ukrainian brigades have been lavishly equipped with Western armored vehicles and they've bounced off a brick wall of positively-ancient minefields and artillery, very similar to the defense-in-depth that the Soviets used to defeat the Germans at Kursk ...in 1943.[3]
This conflict is so complex in terms of difficult-to-measure soft factors that are influencing the battlefield (training, maintenance, corruption, NATO ISR support, information operations/propaganda, etc.), that drawing conclusions about the merits of individual technical systems or especially the overall tech base of the two main powers (Russia vs "the West") as a whole is....unwise.
[1]https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraines-armor-appears...
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/25/us/ukraine-artillery-brea...
[3]https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/world/europe/ukraine-coun...
The US just lost a 20 year war in Afghanistan against cave dwellers with Soviet-era rifles, homemade explosives and random bits from the bottom of a toolbox. You'd think maybe they'd have busted out the ray guns or spaceships instead of taking the L.
To be fair the US left Afghanistan and the remaining Afghani army crumbled to the taliban pretty quickly.
I’d say the two situations are very different, the US successfully occupied a country that was ~7000km from them.
The Russians have so far failed to take a city that’s ~200km from their own border in about 1 and a half years.
We had control for a long time.
If you have control of an area and mismanage it for years, that's not a military loss. Failure at that point is something different.
But it’s still not comparable to Ukraine.
The sheer scale involved is completely different and really shows the ability of the US to project force.
Whereas Russia is currently struggling to get 200km from their own border.
The causalities scales are also hugely different. The Russians have taken likely close to 5x the causalities in about 1/4 the time.
Russia is clearly not a super power but that doesn’t mean other countries like America aren’t.
As for Afghanistan, well, of course never get involved in a land war in Asia. But that wasn't a conventional war, and our military is intended to fight conventional wars. Our forces really are not set up to respond to the Taliban.
However, if people think they're aliens, that instead turns psychological warfare on its head and into something that inspires awe, wonder and possibility. No one is scared in the ways adversaries want them to be scared, and no one doubts the government is actually capable of handling threats from adversaries.
"Aliens" as an explanation quells the potential for panic, versus adversaries successfully inducing the panic responses they desire. It also gives the opportunity for those who care too much about this to be painted as quacks.
> China/Russia/whoever
As a placeholder for potential US adversaries who might have the motivation do something like this. If you don't like that I said Russia, ignore it and fill it in with China.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/china-air-force-may-take-a...
If you think people are seeing real flying saucers that are defying the laws of physics, I don't know what to tell you.
>China/Russia/whoever can send whatever they want into US airspace and there's nothing that anyone, including the military, can do about it.
So it's not "whatever they want", it's cheap drones and balloons. You make China out to be some scary powerful Boogeyman (which requires the USG to invent alien stories as a cover) and then admit they don't have such capability.
I personally am not scared one iota about Chinese aircraft threatening US airspace. And I am very confident that if such a scenario did arise, the US military would address it in the most appropriate and effective way. Which could range anywhere from ignoring it, to neutralizing with extreme prejudice.
You want people to feel safe and pay their taxes. You want your citizens to believe that the $2 trillion spend on defense every year goes to good use, creating the kind of military and intelligence apparatus that Hollywood portrays.
We fund these types of propaganda campaigns for the same reasons we have military parades and air shows. We saw how well these kinds of "overwhelmingly powerful" government myths worked for both the Soviets and Axis powers in WW2 and we copied it. Every government chasing power and status wants its citizens to feel like they are the most powerful. China and Russia have similar kinds of myths.
But you don't have to take my word for it. Please, continue to believe that spaceships from other planets have crashed and some elite division within the US government managed to retrieve them and keep it secret for 50+ years. Look past the failing state of our infrastructure and continue to believe that an alien species capable of interstellar travel is interested specifically in Americans.
You're presenting a false choice between two conspiracy theories as the only ways to view this situation, which certainly doesn't make your particular conspiracy theory look any more credible.
I don't believe any such thing.
Especially when NATO hasn't fired a shot in Ukraine, but is supplying real-time intelligence to the AFU.
US cold war era surplus + EW helped break an entire Russian army, and may yet break a second.
The allegations by David Grusch that set all this off included that there's been a decades long competition between various nations to collect these craft.
From The Debrief Article
>“His assertion concerning the existence of a terrestrial arms race occurring sub-rosa over the past eighty years focused on reverse engineering technologies of unknown origin is fundamentally correct, as is the indisputable realization that at least some of these technologies of unknown origin derive from non-human intelligence,” said Karl Nell, the retired Army Colonel who worked with Grusch on the UAP Task Force.
My take away had been that most of the allegations are effectively some level all the stuff we've always heard about UFOs has been true this whole time (e.g. Roswell). Essentially one of the worst kept secrets, ignored largely because of the implausibility rather than secrecy.
You're saying this is surfacing to fabricate American excellence and relied on the assumption that these claims are being made because 1) Only a superior nation could hide this and 2) only a superior nation could find them. What has been claimed was that it's barely hidden and a bunch of nations have been finding them. Your argument is against a straw man.
China just finished their first domestic aircraft carrier, and the current military hasn't really been in any major war. In the meantime, the US has continually maintained a state of readiness and nearly constant wars while modernizing its fleet.
But you had to just go 9/11 Truther which means nobody here should really be paying attention to you.
thinking that the person I was responding to was suggesting the DoD may have funded the terrorists (a "conspiracy" is a secret plan to do something unlawful).
After re-reading, I see now the claim is that the DoD may have funded the truthers- which I know nothing about.
[0] https://www.spytalk.co/p/exclusive-fbi-agents-accuse-cia-of
The moment the Rubicon is crossed, both the US and China would fall into an all out economic depression and that is exactly why that Rubicon will not be crossed in my lifetime.
This might be an issue at some point if you just graduated high school but for now we have mutually assured economic destruction.
I am far more worried about a debt bomb going off in China than a real bomb.
World order is changing. China is a rising military power. People may even see foreign spy aircraft (e.g. Chinese weather balloons) over US airspace. The DoD would rather you believe it's aliens. This kind of propaganda works great on older boomers in particular because they've been conditioned to believe it all their life.
The US military is not able to coverup something like a crashed alien spacecraft. They couldn't even stop a dozen men with box cutters from crashing planes into buildings. I would not be surprised in the least to find out that the 9/11 conspiracies were funded by the DoD—probably by the same people doing this nonsense now. Again, "they" would rather you believe in a supremely powerful government with space lasers than have their true incompetence unmasked.