I believe the strategy is deny access to the littoral combat zone using more missiles and torpedos than can be defeated with counter-measures. Hundreds can be launched; only one needs to hit. They’d all be launched from shore batteries and dozens of fast-moving small green-water craft.
They don’t have anything that can counter a carrier battle group in the open sea, besides nuclear weapons, but that’s not where they’d want to fight.
On a lighter note, I hope I wasn’t the only one who thought of Thermopylae when reading this. 
Not being mean, I will start contributing again when business slows down. I just have to point out the irony of someone with “Logistic” in his name saying something like this “I’m not so sure the availability of petroleum would be a massive hinderance for military operation.” lmaooooooooooo
To back up Malachai’s point (in a nicer way), the US military is one of the (if not the) single biggest consumers of petroleum fuels in the world. Indeed, the focus on the Middle East makes perfect sense in the context of power projection - if your military relies on gas, then it must have constant supplies of gas in order to project it to the fullest extent possible.
Make no mistake about it, the US government needs hegemony over the Middle East and/or other petroleum exporting regions in order to maintain/expand its hegemony over the rest of the world.
For the US, ha. As I said would be plenty to go around to fuel the military machine. The private sector will take a huge hit though. I’m not talking about how a lack of fuel would hinder a military operation. Obviously it would. However I doubt that the US military would actually face a limit of fuel, at least in the first years of the conflict. I don’t even know if a protracted large-scale war would be possible given how modern wars seem to go.
Please note when I said “fuel in the tanks” I was speaking poetically… if we can’t buy what we need, we’re screwed. And in the modern world, you can’t isolate yourself and keep up… titanium is a building block in much of our latest military equipment… mining it within US territory would be many times more costly than buying it in the open market. If no one will trade with the US government because it’s broke, the US government will discover headwinds to the production and maintenance of a military apparatus that they’ve never imagined could exist.
Clayton -
Says who? The crimal gangs in Russia, who are connected to Russia’s political elite, have technology that is up there with Microsoft, IBM, etc. Hell, they’re the one who find the exploits in those companies’ technologies. The gangs have thousands of zero-day exploits that they could use against the USA government. One simple email with spyware attached to it and now you have some USA general’s battle plans.
Plus, Russia can tap into Eastern European criminal gangs for more technology.
Why does China need submarines when it can hack into American submarines and crash them tino the ocean floor?
But the political elite* and TPTB and are not nationalists. They’re a bunch of clans that coordinate and they’re turn on each within a heart beat; and they will sure as hell sell off the masses.
*On camera they might say, “we must defend America,” but once they pull out their investment out of the USA and instead invest in Asia, why would they care? What are the masses gonna say; “shame on you!”?
Mmm. Would no company ever stage its own failure? Is there no way the directors can benefit from that happening?
I don’t think they can actually do that.
A submarine is not remote-controlled. It only has communication channels to the outside world. They can probably be hacked, and the sub located with such information, but probably not more than that… (Do they need more than that? Lol…)
If Iran hacked that Predator drone a whiles back, it’s because they are controlled remotely.
By the same token, organised crime in the USA is an extension of the CIA. Italian mafia and some of the largest Mexican cartels certainly, who knows who else…
That’s all you need. The strategy would be to convince someone on the inside to sink the ship. But that’s probably too difficult. A better strategy would be to get someone to turn off the submarine’s defenses and then have another American submarine attack it. Look up “social engineering.”
What was your point?
I can’t, goddamit! Not with that link.
But I get it… They have friend-or-foe targeting systems.
Well, the Americans could get the keys to the enemy defense systems the same way the Russians or Chinese could get the keys to the enemy’s offensive ones. I don’t think one side has the obvious upper hand in terms of computer espionage.
I agree with you.
But remember, I was replying to this:
“You also realize the Russian equipment, with the possible exception of tech waeponry, is two decades older than current U.S. equipment.”
Yeah, that sounds a bit far-fetched. But I think the key issue here is that the 2nd-tier miltiary powers are definitely thinking in an asymmetric mode. They’re focused on what gives them the biggest bang for their buck while the US focuses on the biggest bang at any price (e.g. MOAB) in order to induce “shock & awe”. But “shock & awe” only works on 3rd rate or lower powers… China and Russia will not be shocked or awed by anything we do.
They have active intelligence agencies whose purpose is to keep them abreast of the very latest in US capabilities, a good deal of which can be reasonbly surmised by close reading of official DoD reports, un-classified gov. financial data, Jane’s, Popular Science and globalsecurity.org. They have their own spy satellites and advanced ELINT capabilities. There have been speculations that Russian ELINT has actually been ahead of US ELINT for a long time due to increased investment in these kinds of technologies during the Cold War era.
So, all those drones and Shock & Awe weapons are a waste of money when it comes to confronting an actual military that isn’t going to get spooked and is happy to shoot back. Rather than wasting their money on Hollywood weapons, China and Russia are building cost-effective anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles. Without that “full-spectrum dominance” we’ve become so accustomed to, we’re just another ground force and then it’s a question of whether their soldiers or our soldiers are better fighters. I don’t meant to dengirate any of my fellow Americans but I believe the Chinese soldier at least is a damn sight hungier than the American soldier.
On the question of nukes, I’m going to go way out into left field… I am beginning to suspect more and more that nukes themselves are a hoax. I made a thread on this issue a while back, search it up to see my thoughts on it. In any case, assuming they are, in fact, real, the use of nuclear weapons is by and large a “complete and total no no under any circumstances” so I don’t really see any strategic scenario in which nukes would become a factor.
Clayton -
They might as well be a hoax. More damage was done by incendiary bombings than the nukes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A lot of “nuke” tests are known to be simulations using lots and lots of conventional explosives, to produce exactly the same results. (Without the fallout, for which you’d just need to throw in some radioactive material to make a big dirty-bomb.)
They’ve always struck me as very impractical, and in accordance with a doctrine of ‘shock-and-awe’. Like elephants with cannons on their backs. (Medieval II Total War is an awesome video game, btw.)
But what about the measurable spikes in the Earth’s background radiation after big nuke tests, like Tsar Bomba…?
Unless those are all secret nuclear accidents, or just tests with big dirty-bombs, who knows…
This is what I am getting at in defense of your OP. Why would China spend $1 trillion on a high-tech navy, when it can spend $100 billion to buy compute time from Amazon AWS (covertly) to hack into the navy’s weapons and communications system and wreck havoc?
I agree with Marc Faber and others that WW3 will be more cyber and biochemical than guns.
Immediately before and during the war, what will happen to the Chinese, Iranian, and Russian scientists in the USA? Is the USA government gonna go to Stanford, MIT, etc. and round them up? How many of them do you think are spies; or would at least be sympathetic to their former countries.
(Since I live in Calfornia) I can tell that if the USA ever invaded Mexico, there would be havoc in California. So, would the USA government need to have an effective propaganda campaign before the war? Would there need to be more action movies where the Chinese and the Russians are the bad guys?
Kinetic ops dont go away in fourth generation warfare, they just become a part of a bigger plan. Your reference to biochem is interesting. Bio and chem has always been more about fear, terror, and area denial than it has been about causing actual casualties. In studying warfare, we recognize that the physical level is subordinate to the mental, and the mental level is subordinate to the moral.
This. Ground-zero of the Trinity test site was covered in a radioactive glass substance dubbed “Trinitite”. The government cleaned it up back in the 50’s or 60’s and today, it is illegal to attempt to remove a piece of Trinitite from the site.
Off-the-chart Geiger counter readings is enough to deter anybody from trying to do any sort of critical investigation of the factuality of nuclear tests.
Clayton -
I think the Elites are themselves too scared of WMDs to actually use them. I mean, if you release an airborne, flesh-eating Ebola virus that kills off 95% of the planet’s population, how do you make sure that 95% doesn’t include you or your family? OK, so you vaccinate yourself (seriously?) but then, what happens when your enemy, in retaliation, releases his own strain of 95% death-rate, airborne, flesh-eating Ebola virus which your vaccine does not stop? So, they don’t even want to go there. They’re sociopaths but not suicidal.
But, yeah, whatever war they’re preparing for is going to be an economic war. It’s going to be about who has been wasting trillions on sci-fi fantasy projects and who has been penny-pinching every nickel to get the most bang for their buck. The penny-pincher’s going to win because he can outlast. There are no targets, anymore. Well, except US aircraft carriers. There’s no Big Factory you can go bomb and shut down All Military Production. There’s no single capitol you can go invade and Take Over.
I saw a photo of Iranians training on dirt bikes. These are two man teams, one driving, one shooting, like they’re on a horse. Imagine 100,000 of those guys coming your way and you’re in Humvees, A1 Abrams and Bradley APCs. How are you going to pick off 50,000 little motor bikes? Even if you had total air superiority (and you won’t), you’re 1/10th as mobile and agile as they are. Even if you stay in a defensive column to prevent a major assault, the level of attrition they can inflict with real weapons (anti-tank, anti-personnel, etc.) is massive and it’s cheap. And they’re running that whole show on 1/100th of what you’re spending per day. Even if you have 10x as much money as they have, they can still keep going 10x longer than you can.
Stupid Americans think the only difference between Iraq and Iran is the last letter of their names. Saddam was a fool. He lost the Iran-Iraq war to unarmed Iranians. Look it up! Iran is over twice the population of Iraq, nearly 1/3 the population of the US. Unlike Iraq, Iran will enjoy protection from Russia and China because Iran is a major oil supplier for both of them - I think Iran has the 3rd largest oil reserves in the world and pipes oil directly into Russia and China. Attacking Iran is like trying to sabotage the breaker box on the back porch of your highly-armed enemy. He’s not going sit idly by and watch you shut off his power.
My view: The US military is a bully. They can beat the shit out of tiny little countries and bomb them into the stone age from a position of absolute air, space and sea superiority but when they next pick a fight with someone who can hit back, they’re going to find out just how flabby they’ve become.
Clayton -