I assume there would be a lot of people that research and make plans about hypothetical scenarios, and that would help inform the state on how to defend imperialism from possible threats. With the development of more advanced technology, I feel like if these guys were really good at what they were doing they could probably come up with horrifying methods of mass control or something.
But also, my impression is that as with most things under capitalism, the bureacracy could just be totally incompetent and end up being a paper tiger. When the day comes where the status quo has to be sustained by extreme violence, all of the fancy tech and plans break down and everything devolves into regular war.
Reality probably lies somewhere in between the two, I just really hope the technocracy isnt competent enough to be that good at doing evil, cause if thats the case we have a very bleak future in front of us.
The thing about military equipment is that nobody is actually fighting a great powers war right now, so we don't actually know what works, what doesn't, and how systems will interact to create new conditions that have never been seen before. There are some obvious losers (the F-35), but there's no real-world testing. If a war were to happen, we'd probably find that the US's military is a whole lot of excuses to shovel money to defense contractors, but we'd also find that every other military is full of hardware and doctrines based on no better epistemology than "somebody convinced their superiors."
So, yes, the US military is probably garbage. But that doesn't mean anyone else's is doing great.
True. But if nobody can project power overseas then that's still a net bad for the US military, because they're the only ones trying to do that.
:gold-communist: