I mean our top generals can literally just call china's top generals and talk about shit, like when that one dude called china to reassure them trump wouldn't do anything after he lost the election so maybe the military would be against any military action but idfk
The US military is probably painfully aware of its own simulations where they try to intervene in Taiwan and get crushed. Fighting is one thing, getting sent off on a suicide mission is quite another.
Partially because most of that money goes directly to pay salaries and insurance for a massively bloated MIC. Partly because the money gets spent on self-defeatingly high tech weapon systems. The F-35, for instance, can only fly something like once a week because of how much maintenance it requires for every hour of flight time, and it's impossible to get replacement parts for it because they're not producing enough of them and the logistics train is a nightmare. The US has to share spare parts with every country that flies F-35s across the entire planet and there isn't enough to go around. A super high tech space fighter is useless if it can only fly one sortie before it has to spend five days on the ground just waiting for a hypersonic cruise missile that cost 1% as much as the plane to blow it up. The MV-22 Osprey can do things that a conventional helicopter or plane can't do, but it's vastly more expensive than either and requires far more maintenance. The US surface fleet has no credible defense against hypersonic anti-ship missiles and it has no credible defense against Chinese attack submarines, which have an embarrassing habit of surfacing in the middle of US Carrier battle groups without anyone knowing in advance.
US military spending is focused heavily on being as expensive as possible, not being efficient and practical. If we were concerned about practical warfighting we'd be building of AI-driven F-16 drones, or just regular F-16s, instead of a handful of White Elephant F-35s. We'd still be building A-10 Warhogs, which are overwhelmingly the most successful ground attack aircraft ever designed, with massive firepower and massive survivability and loiter time. We wouldn't have fifty different procurement programs for different kinds of light and medium armored trucks that all suck and are over-specialized and end up needing to be replaced every few years. The only thing the US military is smart about right now is using drones as much as possible, since drones are relatively cheap, but you still can't win a war with air strikes no matter how cheap it gets.
In a hot war with China over Taiwan the US would probably lose whatever carrier battle groups were sent to Taiwan in massively one-sided massacres. And without the carrier battle group the US has nothing. It can't send troops to Taiwan without carriers to support and protect them, so it can't do shit unless it wants to escalate all the way to nuclear.
The other part of it is that the US military is expensive because we're an occupying army. Instead of staying at home conserving resources for a real war we're spread out in hundreds of military bases across the globe, and all those bases need cash for housing and fuel and electricity and weapons and salaries and god knows what else, and if we stop paying for it all we lose our death grip on that region.
China's army can be cheap because the PLA stays at home and doesn't fuck with the internal affairs of most of the countries on the planet. And they can be cheap because they can build a hypersonic cruise missile for a million dollars that will kill a carrier worth a billion dollars.
I mean our top generals can literally just call china's top generals and talk about shit, like when that one dude called china to reassure them trump wouldn't do anything after he lost the election so maybe the military would be against any military action but idfk
:shrug-outta-hecks:
The US military is probably painfully aware of its own simulations where they try to intervene in Taiwan and get crushed. Fighting is one thing, getting sent off on a suicide mission is quite another.
Really hope that's true.
why do they do so poorly in their simulations when they spend more on military than like the next 10 countries combined?
Partially because most of that money goes directly to pay salaries and insurance for a massively bloated MIC. Partly because the money gets spent on self-defeatingly high tech weapon systems. The F-35, for instance, can only fly something like once a week because of how much maintenance it requires for every hour of flight time, and it's impossible to get replacement parts for it because they're not producing enough of them and the logistics train is a nightmare. The US has to share spare parts with every country that flies F-35s across the entire planet and there isn't enough to go around. A super high tech space fighter is useless if it can only fly one sortie before it has to spend five days on the ground just waiting for a hypersonic cruise missile that cost 1% as much as the plane to blow it up. The MV-22 Osprey can do things that a conventional helicopter or plane can't do, but it's vastly more expensive than either and requires far more maintenance. The US surface fleet has no credible defense against hypersonic anti-ship missiles and it has no credible defense against Chinese attack submarines, which have an embarrassing habit of surfacing in the middle of US Carrier battle groups without anyone knowing in advance.
US military spending is focused heavily on being as expensive as possible, not being efficient and practical. If we were concerned about practical warfighting we'd be building of AI-driven F-16 drones, or just regular F-16s, instead of a handful of White Elephant F-35s. We'd still be building A-10 Warhogs, which are overwhelmingly the most successful ground attack aircraft ever designed, with massive firepower and massive survivability and loiter time. We wouldn't have fifty different procurement programs for different kinds of light and medium armored trucks that all suck and are over-specialized and end up needing to be replaced every few years. The only thing the US military is smart about right now is using drones as much as possible, since drones are relatively cheap, but you still can't win a war with air strikes no matter how cheap it gets.
In a hot war with China over Taiwan the US would probably lose whatever carrier battle groups were sent to Taiwan in massively one-sided massacres. And without the carrier battle group the US has nothing. It can't send troops to Taiwan without carriers to support and protect them, so it can't do shit unless it wants to escalate all the way to nuclear.
The other part of it is that the US military is expensive because we're an occupying army. Instead of staying at home conserving resources for a real war we're spread out in hundreds of military bases across the globe, and all those bases need cash for housing and fuel and electricity and weapons and salaries and god knows what else, and if we stop paying for it all we lose our death grip on that region.
China's army can be cheap because the PLA stays at home and doesn't fuck with the internal affairs of most of the countries on the planet. And they can be cheap because they can build a hypersonic cruise missile for a million dollars that will kill a carrier worth a billion dollars.