It’s this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
Basically a US war gaming exercise against Iran. The US did horribly, to the point that they hobbled the opfor so that the bluefor could win. The marine general who commanded the opfor did a bunch of asymmetrical warfare stuff that the Iranians might do and just clobbered the conventional forces.
I think the constant messaging about China being the next regional hegemon and regional alliances being developed to counter US hegemony leads to a false sense of equivalency. The relationship that US has with Israel, or even NATO, is not really mirrored in a real way yet among BRICS or China/Russia/Iran, etc. they have mutual interests (or grievances I guess) and incentive to cooperate to counter western trespass on their sovereignty, but they’re not at the level where they have mutual defence agreements where they will step in and get involved directly militarily if something like this happens.
China has military build up, but has not been a bellicose power yet—they mostly operate via economic power and diplomacy up to now, and so I don’t think most of their partner countries would assume they would show up with an army to support them if they were invaded.
They might send aid or military supplies or something, that would be in the realm of possibility, but feels like that might even be too direct of a military involvement for their tastes?
Man, I hope tac nukes are not in the cards. If this really isn’t about Iranian nuke program, but more about Bibi’s continued political health and the US trying to isolate China, etc, then really taking out the facilities wouldn’t matter much. Drop MOABs on Fordow and then resume the bullshit propaganda they’ve been doing the whole time…
Then again, after this, Iran has almost no choice but to get nukes, which then makes killing its program a real objective for Israel and US… we had to blow up the nuke program that doesn’t exist, but once we do it they will have to pursue it, so hence it was a good idea to blow up their program!
At least from that tweet, not much—it lists a littoral combat ship, 3-4 mine countermeasures ships and a spec ops ship or something. So utility, but not anything amazing in its own right. The announcement the tweet is replying to suggests that all of the ships are leaving port (not just the US ships) to spread out and not be sitting there at docks stationary inside range of potential attacks. Also the 5th fleet, which I assume these are a subset of, sounds like it is stationed in the Middle East anyway, so not as remarkable compared to news that, like a major element of the pacific or European fleet have redeployed into the Middle East.
Vaguely, but can’t remember the content exactly. But yeah that was my recollection was that this ‘bogeyman’ from my teenage years (I learned how to pronounce his name properly after hearing it so much during the bush years) suddenly being an online poster and all that.
Yeah I totally agree, doubt they have any current plans to invade and occupy—but where I start to worry is what happens when Iran pops a carrier that got a little too close or something. The Yemenis seemed to give a pretty rough ride to the various carrier groups that were sent there under Biden and Trump, and I assume that IRGC has planned for decades about what to do if American naval assets get too close during a conflict (millennium challenge and all that).
Basically just: Trump wades into Iran for some long distance bombing that he can brag about, while Israel bombs the shot out of civilians, media and hospitals, but then something unplanned happens and now we’re looking at something longer and nastier. Or like some other semi-challenging power weighs in to help Iran, like Pakistan (doubtful I know) and now you have mini-world war battle lines being drawn.
Dude has had such a weird arc over the years.
So if (when) US gets officially and directly involved in attacking, my first assumption is it will look like the recent Yemen activity; lots of air strikes, stuff launched from boats.
But if the conflict deepens, I am curious to see what people think: would Trump admin do a draft for a ground invasion of Iran?
Ground invasion seems like a very poor idea generally, but since when has reality guided decision-making at the White House lately? This is total pie in the sky speculation, but the war regardless would be unpopular at home, and any move to deploy actual infantry even more so.
They’ve already spent the last few months getting the country used to crackdowns on protests, as well as using fed law enforcement and military assets to terrorize people unaccountably. They also have shown they give mostly zero fucks about courts and will shoot first and ask questions later at all times.
Given Trump’s scheme to use ICE to harass democrat/blue cities, if they did do a draft, why not use it to disproportionately grab liberal/left voters and box em up/sacrifice them to the mill? You could take all of the data they've stolen from agencies and had palatir compile to target it, just like they’ve been practicing with the immigration crackdown. Would be a good way to liquidate some opposition and chill what will otherwise be a potentially hot and spicy summer, etc. you could make draft dodging a method of removing citizenship of your enemies, or use the heightened tensions at the border to interdict people trying to flee. Trump could even couch it all in WW2 glorious war effort bullshit to try and give it some sort of shine.
Anyway, I suspect this is pretty far fetched, but would appreciate your counter points and corrections to help me discard this concept so I can move on to being anxious about one of the thousands of other grim things that loom on the horizon.
Ah man, been wondering if he’s been posting out there about this.
It’s been ten years now, but I went to Beijing and xian over 10 days and was fairly ignorant and neutral going in on China. There’s some annoying stuff, but I could not shake how it felt like they had surpassed us clearly then, and I was visiting a not horrible near future. This was a decade ago, and you could pay for everything using QR codes, including street vendors. There were fancy coffee shops where you had to use the codes. We didn’t have WeChat with money enabled (you need a Chinese bank acct) but the cashier was very nice and paid for our coffees with her WeChat and we gave her cash.
That’s all window dressing though, compared to the infrastructure. We took a high speed train to xian from Beijing and it took 3 hours, for a trip that used to be 14 hours. As we were travelling you could see other high speed rails being constructed in all of these directions, using huge modular concrete sections, they clearly had optimized the process.
Zero visible crime. There were Chinese army ads everywhere and visible presence in big public areas, but this was not any different than back home so I hardly noticed it. There were… PUBLICALLY AVAILABLE BATHROOMS EVERYWHERE.
Mass transit in Beijing, which is fucking huge, was highly functional, clean and on time. They’d built like 4-5 new major subways in the last decade leading up to the Olympics, on top of the many they already had.
The smog was bad, and it was hot because it was August, but again, we have that here as well. They had a govt program to plant millions of trees going and you could see them from the high speed rail.
Anyway, I was throughly convinced on that trip that they were gonna drink our milkshake and we deserved it. They were selling multiple domestic smartphone brands for the same as iPhones (which is to say quite expensive) and were building tons of tourist stuff all over the place, but for internal tourists, not external.
I could list things I found unsettling, but honestly most of them could be explained by the fact that I was raised in a individualistic culture and not a more communal one, or were things I’ve realized are the same here.
As a foreigner I wasn’t affected by the firewall, and I was against the firewall, but to be fair, it’s not like the internet had been a great thing in the balance, so maybe it was a good idea?
The Atlantic, surprise surprise, is in full consent manufacture mode. It’s so on the nose you can practically see the talking points emails…