An empire needs a frontier. It collapses without one. So what is the U.S.' next frontier project? Biden alluded to it a bit in his speech today, but is there any particular spot in the world that looks ripe for state department ghouls to conjure an existential threat to Freedom, Baseball and Applie Pie?
I mean unless it all just shifts to brinkmanship with China. But I think actual conflict with China runs up against the interests of too big a slice of the capitalist class to make anything more than saber-rattling a possibility in the short term.
What's next is it gets turned inward.
domestic counterinsurgencies, urban occupations, police actions, drone strikes, extraordinary renditions.
it's coming home
Foucalt’s Boomerang. Ready for urban warfare, folks? So many drones
My bet is that is that it ends up not being a specific country and instead they double down on naval control of global shipping lanes. The attempts to stop China, Cuba, Iran, etc from trading with each other will get more desperate and aggressive and there will be a general sense the US needs to grab whatever power it can before China's navy is fully developed and hypersonic missiles proliferate.
I went and did some actual research and I'm pretty sure this one is right.
The defense contractors all have public-facing industry news sites to talk about the things they're working on and want to sell in the future (plus investors relations, fluff pieces about women in STEM, and one article on horse therapy). I went through the news pages of the top five, and the most consistent theme is missile defense systems, with a focus on naval missile defense systems. The point of war is to justify giving money to these companies, and this is what they're selling, so this is the kind of war the US will be looking for.
Other common topics are space stuff, trying to un-fuck the current state of military aircraft (won't happen lol), and the same vaporware about quantum computing and unified command and control systems that they were trying to sell 20 years ago. Also General Dynamics recently secured a contract for a bunch more tanks, so but it's on a scale that can be sent off to oppress Palestine some more.
industry news
I love the industry news that leaked out about China's 350~ boats. The US Navy embarrassingly has only 295 ships! (that are mostly better ATM)
"We have to build more to remain competitive!"
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2020/3/9/eagle-vs-dragon-how-the-us-and-chinese-navies-stack-up
The U.S. Navy currently has 69 submarines.
nice
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2021/04/12/chinas-navy-has-more-ships-than-the-us-does-that-matter/
While China’s fleet size, emboldened posture and rapid growth are cited by some U.S. military leaders as key reasons why the U.S. Navy needs to grow and further invest in the Indo-Pacific, the PLAN still lags the United States in certain key areas.
“Modern naval warfare is missiles, and China has a lot more platforms capable of shooting and a lot more missiles.”
based
Damaged U.S. ships would “have to limp to Japan, Australia or all the way home,” Herzinger noted. “And we lack the shipyards.”
:sicko-wholesome:
“We’ve got a Navy that we’ve worn out bombing trucks, weddings and huts in Afghanistan for 20 years,” Herzinger said. “Our Navy is ‘better’ in some ways, but it might not necessarily be those ways that make the difference in a peer war with the Chinese. Numbers definitely matter.”
cyp
“Having said that, a major caveat that I have to stress at every turn is that it is not in the interests of the U.S. or China to have a maritime conflict,” he added. “It’s not good for them or good for us.”
always got to sneak in one of these antiposadist propaganda pieces at the end :dean-frown:
The F-35 was supposed to be a unified plane that could do everything for every branch of the military, ended up horribly over budget and behind schedule, and is a barely functioning death trap. The long/expensive development process displaced the R&D budgets for anything else, so they're stuck with it until the next generation of aircraft. Also various branches of the military are contractually obligated to buy lots of them.
The US is in full control of the world's sea lanes and has been since 1945.
The Water Wars of Africa are coming. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but within the decade just you wait
Drone strikes, wherever we can get away with it. My expectation is that we won't be sending troops anywhere for a long time. Of course they need to keep producing more military stuff in order to launder money, but drones are the perfect solution for them, bombs are single use so you can keep making more of them, and they don't put Americans in danger so you don't have to worry about the "Support our troops, bring them home" libs. And nobody at home is going to notice the difference between 1,000 drone strikes and 10,000 drone strikes. Tbh I suspect that's part of why the US is withdrawing from Afghanistan, because we just figured out a better solution to the need for incessant military spending.
The existential threat will of course be China. There's no reason that the existential threat has to be the same place that we're dropping bombs so we can make more bombs.
Short of actually cutting the military budget, which would probably require a coup at this point, the best case scenario would be if someone convinced the Pentagon to start making gold-plated bombs. If we're really lucky, maybe we can get some bullshit "cyberwar arms race" going on, but I think people would realize it's bullshit.
Launder? You mean justify the govt giving money to defense executives?
I wouldn't be surprised if the military-industrial complex turned towards the domestic market and started unloading their gear on internal US security forces. Chuds love spending money on the police and there's no actual risk involved as with foreign wars.
Saber rattled at the USSR for about a decade, and then Desert Storm
The African continent is home to five of the top 30 oil-producing countries in the world.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/101515/biggest-oil-producers-africa.asp
Welp
I think maybe we're seeing the beginning of the end of the oil age though. Not now obviously, but if the push for electric cars accelerates while devestment from public transportation deepens, then I see the next rush being on countries with lots of lithium.
So wait, still a lot in Africa then.
Welp
Unfortunately, electric cars won't end capitalist industry's gorging on oil. It's still a huge part of agriculture and materials production.
That's true, I underestimated how much petroleum plastic is in... everything.
Afghanistan has the world's largest lithium supply, for electric batteries. Just wait for Afghan War II: Electric Boogaloo
Hey, don't forget, we gave a metric shit load of money and weapons to the Mujahideen. I wonder how that turned out.
if they try a real invasion of cuba with nato support they might actually blow nato up lmao
The US is already doing shit all around the world, just with special forces instead of the traditional military.
I think the days of old school military invasions are coming to a close, I think Iraq and Afghanistan were too much trouble, they were such glaring contradictions people started noticing.
They're bringing the frontier home and I'm the excuse they've been praying for.
The whole point is just to sell weapons, and with military police all but completely normalized and bourgeois chuds chomping at the bit to get their hands on all that high tech crap, I don't see why we wouldn't just turn inwards.
The libs will create the conditions for brown shirts to rise during the next term or two and the republicans will have everything they need to go full fascist.
Probably some latin america interventions too though, they're getting uppity again. Hell maybe that's the goal. Try to finish off what we started with the first indigenous genocides.
Idk. I feel like they recently tried and failed to do imperialism in Cuba, Lebanon, Belarus, Bolivia, and Venezuela. A safe bet would be somewhere in the global south but that's unbelievably broad. They might just try to fuck over AMLO and Lula
They can do that at the same time they prepare to murder more people with their military.
as much as theyve been angling towards maybe cuba, the incredibly obvious scale of this fuckup of an exit will make it a loooooooooooot harder to manufacture consent for any overt action any time soon, i think. not impossible, of course, but definitely much harder
i think people are really underestimating what a devastating blow this sudden and incredibly humiliating collapse in afghanistan is for american empire and its "credibility"
Yeah I think people underestimate just how much public opinion shapes action. It doesn’t decide on policies, but it can certainly slow them down or limit their scope of it becomes politically untenable to publicly support them. America’s been making its allies nervous for years now
I'm guessing South America or Cuba like others have said.
It's what we know. We can't fight China in proxy wars because they are shrewd enough to exert soft power that can't be challenged.
South America, obviously :agony-deep:
Nah, there's no point pulling a full invasion and carpet bombing here
