When And Where Will A Great Power War Happen?

In the paragraph beginning “If there is a war, it could explode in any number of areas…” there is this sentence: “Israel recently attacked Israel diplomatically….” There may be a typo in there somewhere.

Basically, the US is like Japan pre-World War II: powerful military, no way to keep up with losses during a war.

The legacy of the Cap Weinberger “Be All You Can Be!” military. No draft, no manpower depth, hideously expensive and complicated ‘shock and awe’ weapons meant to overwhelm third-world conventional armies so that our elites can have their Vietnams for the interests of Exxon-Mobil and United Fruit with little manpower risk and thus few body bags (so no Vietnam War domestic backlash).

Of course, since then we’ve made the hideously expensive weaponry even more hideously expensive because Congress hamstrung the Pentagon in lowering contractor costs (like Medicare was hamstrung in negotiating drug prices). Once a subordinate of mine needed to buy a laser box, which was made expressly for the US military and sold for over $20,000. She was able to talk the vendor down over the phone to $1,500. And I’m sure they made lots of money at $1,500 as it was just a metal box with some electrical connections. That’s why the US spends almost WWII money in real dollars for a military of only a fraction of WWII’s size and power.

There is no way for the US to field such a force without:

a) the Pentagon being able to demand the contractor’s cost and force them to sell and manufacture at a reasonable (say, 5 %) profit;

b) weapons must be made simpler, more robust, less complicated and easier to service. Spare parts must be readily available. This may mean making them less ‘shock and awe’-y but if you can make more of them, quantity has a quality all of its own. It may also mean more body bags but that’s an unpleasant fact about war that we’ve tried to minimize (as I said, to make constant war for at least our side a bit more palatable; we don’t mind how many babies on the other side we kill).

c) You have to go back to a mass army again. The volunteer force never had enough depth. Native-born youth is out-of-shape and sick, and fewer in number, so you’ll have to use immigrants most likely to help fill the gap.

I will note that insofar as c) is concerned, neither Russia nor China is in better shape, as both are experiencing demographic issues (though I think their youth populations are healthier than ours). So immigration would be a big asset for the US, if some Americans can get over their fears of brown “Jesus”es coming up from the south. If our history is a guide, the only way we really treat other human beings as potential citizens is after they demonstrate that their bodies too can stop bullets just as well as any white man’s.

I think it’s worth noting that while the US government is currently controlled by Zionist interests, there are significant tensions on the issue in the US political class. Biden’s government is old guard. But there is a strong faction of the bureaucracy that has about had enough, and there seems to be a gradual shift in the Democratic party under way, where AIPAC etc. are no longer capable of reliably ending careers of Democratic politicians they don’t like, while various forces push for non- or less- pro-Zionist politicians to be elected. Some of these forces are about grassroots humanitarian stuff, but I think there is also an increasing perception among many Democrats that Israel is backing the Republicans, and some of the foreign policy elites just want more room to maneuver and are starting to see Israel less as a useful tool and more as locking them into a troublesome position in the region, boxing them into a corner.

I would not be surprised if by the 2028 election (if it happens) the Democratic party will be so mixed on Zionism as to make their policy positions quite unpredictable, if not actually majority unfriendly to Zionism. The Republicans will still be pro-Zionist because Dominionists and because they are for anything the Democrats are against and because the big Zionist donors will be concentrating their efforts there.

So yeah, I think the relationship between the US and Israel is going to enter a period of flux. In the only slightly longer term, oil companies are going to lose a lot of political power as everyone starts driving electric cars, and the Middle East will lose foreign policy centrality.

It’ll be Iran and it will probably happen this year.

The folly in our rulers’ thinking behind it though, IMO, is their assumption that China will sit it out.

And it’s not only China that our rulers ought to worry about. There’s Russia, of course, though they are pretty tied up in Ukraine, but there’s also North Korea, which is allied with China and Russia and has recently been cozying up to Iran. One of the early responses could very well be NK bombing Samsung. That would place the West’s semiconductor supply one China bombing of TSMC away from an economically damaging shortage of them.

NK bombing Samsung would be a very loud warning shot to our rulers to back off. Better to try that first before lighting our final cigar and launching nukes at each other.

Z

An aside, my argument doesn’t include the nuclear exchange. Obviously, should either side go there, any analysis ends with no future hope of resumption in sight.

Not sure it would matter Ian. And I’m not sure anyone has the answer because we’ve never played out a scenario on that scale, with the weapons we currently possess. But, from everything I read, fiction and non, it would largely all be over in about 6 hours.

The U.S. doesn’t need boots on the ground. It just has to destroy infrastructure. And it can. Whereas, Russia and China can’t amass and project power directly to our shores. Sure, “some” hypersonic might get through, but, so?

And so what about the aircraft carriers? Collateral damage. All the better if missiles are wasted on them once the planes are in the air. If nobody has noticed, we have the globe encircled with Air Force bases. They land at those while being refueled in the air. At the end of the day (or 6 hours) the opponents infrastructure is decimated and the west has uncontested air superiority. The United States is untouched. However, martial law is declared. Production facilities nationalized for the re-tooling.

And South America? Yeah, we’d take everything, from everyone, that didn’t align. It’s just too easy and the resources to great. Cuba? Yeah, our new biggest island. Geography.

And, I’m not saying this is truly how it plays out. Nobody can really know. I’m just conveying the base military assumptions. We don’t hear these arguments a lot traveling on the left. But, my legal partner is a retired top gun instructor. We game these things all the time. I know how they think.
It’s a war of attrition, where the attrition rate is so high the winner is declared the next day.

I was wrong on the manned part of the X37B. For now.
Feel like I’ve run my yapper enough. I’ll shut up.

It’s not just the U.S., Purple Library Guy. It’s the combined air power of the western world, estimated at 3 times Russia and China combined, coming at you from every corner of the globe … immediately after all the cruise missiles have exposed and sapped your defenses, throwing crazy electronic warfare measures, which you’re focusing on, when, oh crap, how’d we miss all those stealth bombers? And you can bet the farm the targets have already been triaged to inflict maximum damage to production facilities.

A scale and speed unfathomable to anything we know from history.

Meanwhile? Boeing, Lockheed, Bombardier, Dassault, General Dynamics, Saab, Northrop? They’re finishing lunch and going back to work.
Geography. Firstest with the mostest.

“People think this is still 1990 or 2000. It isn’t.”

Yeah, I get that (I ‘ve been reading Ian Welsh…). And overall what you are saying in this post makes sense to me.

Times are changin’, but still, “legacy” military starting strength has got to be a significant factor in calculations, more so during any buildup, escalation, or posturing phase.

The U.S. mainland is pretty hard to get at, has never been militarily invaded(except by the Brits/Canada back in the day) so they don’t have the same skin in the game as say, anyone else. It’s long coloured the thinking of leaders and riff-raff alike.

@VietnamVet

An armistice was signed, and the US promptly reneged on it, by introducing forbidden nuclear weapons into the peninsula.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Armistice_Agreement#Subsequent_events

I believe NK was the only nation that MAD – mutually assured destruction – was not in effect.

And this was only a few years after the horrific genocidal bombing of the country by the US. Your “Abrahamic religions’ End of Days” was already experienced by them, courtesy of 600,000 tons of TNT and napalm flown in and dropped by the US air force.

(I’m guessing profiteering generals were not really a thing back then, so something else besides money must have been driving the US’s hyper-aggressive policies.)

And then there was the Agreed Framework of 1994, where contrary to misinformation, NK completely abided by its agreement to not process plutonium but the US refused honor even a single item it promised. No light-water reactor, no formal ending of the war, and no lifting of sanctions. NK not processing uranium and not doing missile tests were not a part of the formal agreement but things NK honored in the spirit of the deal. They began doing those things four years into the agreement out of frustration, and as a ploy to get the US back to the negotiating table.
(Fmr Secretary of Defense William Perry has been a truth-teller on these matters.)

And another four years later NK finally ran out of patience when Bush declared them a part of the Axis of Evil, from which point plutonium processing began.

So the “hubris and ineptitude” has a long tradition, and revealed itself multiple times even when dealing with a single country. It just didn’t matter due to the power gap between the US and everyone else.

Oddly enough, that might be a point of hope, as, other things being equal, the narrowing of that gap might bring some sense to a few of our leaders who might also have some influence.

Yes, we certainly agree on that. And that’s my point about “how they think,” Ian. Everything is “just collateral damage” to the U.S. military. The reason I write these worst case scenarios is to get people imagining just how different the world has become. How awful in the extreme the carnage would be. People don’t like to think about it until they are staring it in the face. See: the Vietnam war. And see: the modern media blackout of the wages of war.

Enlightening discussion Ian. Thank you for the post.

Ian Welsh

America probably needs to lose a war which includes US mainland casualties to make them realize that the heavy hand of war can come home.

Sometimes, I think this would be the best; sometimes I fear we’re like the Weimar Republic (entrenched conservative elites in the bureaucracy, judiciary, business, etc) who do not really believe in democracy and who cannot be thrown out domestically. That’s what the Allies did to Germany and Japan after WWII—we swept all those out of office, putting many on trial for war crimes or crimes against humanity, and put in people who did believe in democracy.

However, I fear we won’t be so lucky as they. Usually the conquerors are more interested in looting than in rebuilding. In our case you can’t blame them as the last 40 or so years of US foreign policy has been more about looting. One of the condemnations of Soviet foreign policy which says a lot about OUR worldview was that Soviet-allied states were actually a drain on the Soviet economy rather than an asset. This condemnation itself says a lot, as it assumes that the “proper” wealth flow should go from weak nations to stronger ones, right?? That the poor peoples of the world should hand what little wealth they have to the rich?

Just want to say something about the TikTok ban in the US. This ban is NOT just about protecting America from China. TikTok has global reach OUTSIDE the US. TikTok is a most popular app in over a hundred countries in the world — including in the Global South where China’s influences are steadily rising while US is facing increasing hostility due to the US complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in West Bank. Once the US gets its hands on TikTok, the US government will definitely use it to spread anti-China and pro-US propaganda. That is the true purpose of forcing Chinese to sell TikTok to the US, so that that US can seize/steal a most popular media tool and then use its global influences against China. I would rather TikTok just gives up its US market (i.e., banned in the US) than to hand over its global influence to the US government.

By laws, the Chinese government can block the forced sale as ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok) has to follow Chinese laws. The CCP should absolutely NOT approve the sales. This is not just business. This is but a battle in the bigger war between the US and China over global influences and the new media. TikTok should NOT be handed over to the US and then be used as tool to expand US influence in the global market. I would rather TikTok just give up on the US market rather than to hand over TikTok influences on all those overseas markets to the US. I hope China is smart enough to realize what is at stake here.

Ian–leaving this here, but it’s off topic and should have been in the open thread.

This doesn’t really undermine the post, but just to be anal:

Yamamoto’s point wasn’t that Japan couldn’t win; it was that Japan couldn’t win a prolonged war. Which the Japanese leadership was broadly in agreement with.

The theory of war they’d decided on was that if they dealt a heavy enough blow at the start the US would agree to a negotiated peace. Which they thought would happen for a variety of reasons, chief being a conviction that the US was a soft democracy lacking ‘warrior spirit’. The Japanese were just as racist as the US, in their own way. Officers who had visited America were usually must less confident things would play out that way.

Also the guy who actually worked out a plan for attacking Pearl Harbor initially came up with something far more robust, that involved deploying two Army divisions to occupy the islands, denying their use to the US if not permanently, then at least for several crucial months. His plan started getting whittled down almost immediately, mainly because the attack was a Navy plan kept secret from the Army, lest the Army veto it entirely as a waste of resources, so no divisions would be available for occupation.

Bill H.

We tried to “hold ground” in Vietnam. Different objectives. Here, the only objective would be to destroy production capabilities in an effort to set Russia and China back 50 years. The western oligarchs win. None of this is about ideology. Both sides are basically fascist. It’s a corporate war, with win vs. lose measured in bank balances.

@Soredemos

Well, the Japanese should just stick to duking it out among themselves to provide material for their great jidaigeki, and showcase their wonderful aesthetics and cool gear. The Genpai War and the Sengoku period are bottomless pots of gold in terms of dramatic potential. And the other periods are almost as rich.

They step out their boundaries and they get the Battle of Baekgang in the 7th century, defeat in the Imjin Wars in the 16th, and likewise in WW2 – the Sino & Soviet & Pacific Wars.

But their position is ambiguous. As Germany is too big for Europe but too small for the world, Japan is too potent to be a small-time player but not big enough to go up against continental superpowers. A population a bit less than Russia in a country a bit less than the size of California, 70% of it mountains, and no significant natural resources.

And the anomalous victories in the first Sino-Japanese and then the Russo-Japanese Wars did not help their acting with prudence and reasonableness. Also, the pride, or hubris, of joining the imperialist club of Britian, France, etc by acquiring Korea and Manchuria. Not to mention the chip on their shoulder from the widespread feeling of being doubled-crossed in negotiations for the spoils from the victory over Russia.

Maybe the US is in a likewise position. Great national mythology. A unipolar moment under historically unique circumstances. Now it finds itself as having been too big for everybody in the past but currently facing other big boys. Whether the US has more checks and balances than Yamamoto & Co in Imperial Japan, and people who will listen to good advice, remains to be seen.

Russia’s recent gains can be measured in centimeters. This against an Ukrainian Army that is supposed to be short on ammunition and manpower and training and equipment and money and leadership.
But if the Russians prove that they have only been pretending to fight and they do actually manage to liberate all of the Ukraine east of the Dniper. They can not stop there.
They have to finish the job that they started. I am not talking about the Ukraine. I am talking about NAT0.
If I had Putin’s ear. I would twist it until he did what I say. What I would say is that once he has liberated the Ukraine east of the Dniper it is time to use his Kinjal missles to destroy every bridge over the Rhine River, except those in Switzerland, at 3 am to avoid unneccessary deaths. Not that I am overly concerned about deaths of westerners at this point. But the timing would be good for public relations for a day or two.
Remember at this point westerners have no right to collective self defence. Their societies started a war of aggression. No wait I got that wrong it is one overt war against Palestine, one against Iran, one against Iraq, one against Afghanistan, one against Cuba, one against Venezuela, one against Nicaragua, one aganist Honduris, one against El Salvador, one against Russia, and one against China. Not to mention Vietnam. But that one should not be mentioned.
We should also not forget that the western leaders wage covert war against everyone.
That means that the deaths of everyone goes on the tab of those leaders, even if it is other westerners getting killed by those who are trying to defend themselves from the western leaders.
That should clear the air of smoke and mirrors. But not of CO2 or methane or nitrous oxide.

A couple of thoughts:

1) Everyone keeps saying that munitions are dangerously depleted without any sense of what the scale of war stores truly is. The numerator of what’s been shipped to Ukraine and Israel is reasonably well known; the denominator of collective NATO ware stores is not. I have found absolutely zip in the way of credible evidence of anyone who has any concrete sense of what proportion of stores have been consumed. Where I do have solid information, I know what we’ve contributed is a drop in quite a large bucket. So where’s the evidence? Literally the only thing I’ve seen here is generals saying that the expenditure is surprisingly high and they want increased spending for more materiel. Which, if one hasn’t been living underneath a rock for the past three decades, is the same thing they always say. (Seriously, you could give these guys a squadron of F35s gratis and they will talk about the need for more appropriations.) Where’s the evidence that stores are so degraded? Actual evidence, not someone tweeting a statement.

2) The 1:7 thing should be taken with a big grain of salt. First it’s a bit out of date now – last I saw it was somewhere between 1:5 and 1:4 and indications are that it will continue to drop. (There’s some happythink that parity will be reached, but I’m very doubtful about this – the Russians get a vote and it doesn’t actually make sense for us to ramp this production up to that scale.) Second, and most importantly, this is for the production of 155 vs 152 mm shells – as in one item among hundreds (if not thousands) and about the plainest thing in the arsenal. What does this look like across the spectrum, moving into stuff that isn’t the pinnacle of 1950s technology (ATGMs, aeroweapons, etc.)? I don’t think that 1:7 number is going to be very typical, even if it was a more meaningful indicator.

As a side note, we do actually think about the amounts of particular munitions we need. How many aim points we’re going to need to be able to hit, how many systems of what types we’re going to need to defeat given adversary TOE, hit rates in given situations, numbers of sorties required, typical exchange ratios, etc. We don’t just say “three dozen sounds great”. I think this has a lot to do with why the Ukrainians are screaming – they know there’s a lot of materiel in the stores that we could fork over but aren’t – because we know how much we’re going to need if things go pear shaped. If we were truly scraping the bottom the of the barrel, their talk wouldn’t focus on transferring systems and ammunition – it’d focus on ramping up production. They want us to embrace more risk and we’re not willing to – which, frankly, I don’t disagree with given how low their competence is and the degree to which they are not acting like a country fighting for their survival. Our forces are designed to move fast and consume modest resources; signing those limited resources over to some guys cosplaying the battle of the Somme is not a smart strategic move.

So I dug through two decades of appropriations documents (boring), using 155mm ammo as the indicator. Based on the numbers therein, I would assess total US Army stockpile of M107 at somewhere between 20 and 25 million rounds.

I didn’t tabulate the numbers for other types of smarter / extended range 155 ammo, but eyeballing it looks like that would total a few million more rounds. Suffice it to say, the cupboard isn’t exactly bare.

Yeah, five years worth of Javelin production – what he doesn’t tell you is that that’s five years of low rate production (i.e., what they do to keep production lines ticking over in case they need to surge them). It’s actually *two* years of FY 2023 production (when they ramped up) and one year of production when it was a new system and they were building stockpile (which I would assess at currently being somewhere between 35 and 38 thousand missiles – I haven’t bothered to tabulate the number of CLUs).

Stinger is so old that I can’t actually come up with a definitive number for total appropriation – the monies they’re currently spending are for modernization and lifetime extension of the Block I missiles, which I believe were procured back in the 80s. A minimum of 11,000 of these were budgeted for SLEP. There is also an indeterminate number of Block II missiles (I think about the same size as the Block I SLEP, but I don’t have definitive evidence for this) and intermittent production of a very small number of missiles for replenishment. Bottom line, again, not a huge proportion of stockpile.

I haven’t tabulated figures for the other systems, but I would bet that they’re going to show similar profiles. Current expenditures are significant and we need to have a plan for replacing expenditures, but we’re also a long way from having depleted stockpiles to the point that combat capability is materially degraded.

If you want to argue that we can’t produce major systems at a rate that would match our likely expenditure in combat, I’m right there with you, but the notion that the cupboard is currently bare just doesn’t seem to be born out in the data. To reiterate, I think the best interpretation is that the cupboard is *finite* and it’s not going to magically get materially bigger if the balloon goes up – which, as I say, likely explains our unwillingness to write blank cheques to Ukraine and influences thinking inside the puzzle palace about Israel.

Similarly, if you want to argue that the expenditure rate is going to be higher than people expect and that the coming expansion of Chinese forces is likely to require additional / different systems, again, I’m right there with you. But again, that’s a different thing than saying that existing stockpiles have been so depleted they can’t support offensive operations. I don’t see how the data support that, no matter how much engagement people get with their tweets or what CEOs who get paid for selling us these systems say. Could it eventually happen? Sure, but my assessment is that we’re not there yet and my prediction is that we’re not going to get there barring direct involvement in new hostilities.