Just for a moment, try to contemplate the following alternate history: what if John Mccain had won the presidency in 2008, but died in office sometime between then and now.

Sarah Palin is now president. Conservative radio hosts are going berserk. What happens next?

Idiotic vitriol, just like now.

Palin claims she can see the tanks from her house

It's fun to make fun of Republicans but it's honestly hard to imagine a president more hawkish than Obama. Most likely it would be the exact same, because there are real foundational issues behind the lack of military response and none of them have much to do with the party in power today.

The United States hasn't fought a real power since WW2 (if you can even consider that conflict symmetric; I don't). They lack the equipment, experience, and political will to fight the war that's coming, and Putin knows it.

The intervening years have been filled with so many Bushes and brushfires that all military training and acquisition is now based around fighting sand nomads. Take the F-22 for example, which was canned specifically because moron congressmen thought they would never have to fight a moneyed power ever again.

Any generals who might have been equipped to handle a war against Russia were fired by Bush for criticizing him, and replaced with freshers who had to cut their teeth on an unloseable war against the most unpopular middle eastern despot. Which they still basically lost.

And all of that is still ignoring the spectre of mutually assured destruction, which Putin would ipso facto win because he is basically a real life Bond villain.

Yikes.

There seems to be a real lack of coherent planning at the DoD. In fact, in the U.S. government in general. We have the largest economy in terms of GDP (after the EU), but no one single group of people or set of orthogonal ideas seems to run the damn thing. If any one single group can be said to be in charge, it might be the collective consciousness of the multinational corporations, but they don't have a vested interest in government planning beyond extracting regulatory arbitrage and shifting costs to others by imposing externalities on other parties.

Looking across the board, we have a multi-billion missile defense system that doesn't work, and an expensive military focused on unwinnable asymmetric warfare against non-state actors happy to bleed us to death by attrition. On the other hand, our nuclear silos are dilapidated, poorly managed, and still running on space-age hardware.

In other words, a giant boondoggle with nobody at the helm, with our debt growing all the time.

I watched a documentary on Putin. Apparently, as a teenager, he walked down to the offices of the KGB and literally asked to be recruited. They didn't take him (one does not become a KGB member by direct application, but is chosen)--but, what a creep!

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Yes. Institutionalized corruption doesn't help, either.

My theory (channeling Jon`C's post on NSA here) is that your most competent and honest people--those with integrity-- don't necessarily join, or go into politics to change organizations like the military and the NSA in times of peace, when there is no urgent need (as there was in WW2).

Meanwhile, too many people who do end up running these important institutions have spent the last couple of decades doing [see Jon`C's post in this thread].

I remember coming across this book a few years ago. We don't want brain drain out of the institutions that keep us alive.

Western politics is a cavalcade of failed businessmen and incompetent attorneys. It's the exact combination of a professionally acquired affectation of confidence needed to get elected, and just enough incompetence that they have nothing more profitable to do with their time.

There isn't and never has been room in the military for intelligence or innovation. Either that gets drummed out of you, or you get drummed out of the military. It worked well because 50 years ago all you fought were mindless automaton soldiers, so a soldier who was even more mindless and predictable was a good thing. In modern times this of course led to handbook trained dip**** generals struggling to figure out what magic combination of approved strategies would help them defeat a highly dynamic and innovative opponent, with hilarious results. And by hilarious, I mean tragic. Although King ****wad Gen. Keith Alexander is an especially funny example of this in action, since his only significant command decision in his entire career was "what the retired guys were doing, only more of it".

The police are the same only worse. Police forces are a job program for people who would become soldiers if they weren't too stupid to follow orders. It's a way of keeping the violent white people out of prison.


A lot of people decry the fact that there aren't more smart, educated people in government. But the truth is, it's working as intended. Look at China. Run by engineers. Still powerless to engineer their own economy, because idiot businessmen built a shadow banking system to get around the regulations out in place to protect them. So it really doesn't matter what you do, as long as you suffer the stupid rich to live they will find a way to make the world worse. You might as well put them where they can do the least damage: government.

^ NB Gen. Alexander's first act as a civilian was to sell NSA secrets about software vulns. The world is a much worse place because he was allowed to retire. Should have chained the **** up in a basement somewhere.

So this is what it feels like when you click on a thread with an intentionally misleading title...

... well played!

Be honest, FastGamerr--you click on every thread anyway.

Don't worry, Westerners, Russia is in Ukraine on a humanitarian mission--thanks, Vlad.

The best general of our time was forced into retirement because he's slightly out of his mind.

Ohh, so apparently Russia IS stealth-invading Eastern Ukraine.

You earn 50/50 FGR points, Reverend Shades of Blue.

Wake it and shake it FGR, the Russians are bringing your coffee!

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Agreed on the political situation. I think practicality means the politicians are forced to be a lot more similar than they make out. For example, no president will risk sinking the economy by turning it over to some ideological populist. Mcain and Obama did a lot of talking about the economy in 2008, but in reality they were both going to let Bernanke pretty much take care of everything, and that's what ended up happening.

However, the US would destroy Russia in a conventional war. Both countries suffer from some level of nepotism and corruption, Russia probably quite a bit more so, but the US has a massive defense budget, and Russia has basically been sitting on moldering Cold War tech for twenty years. We have frustrating issues that are endemic to any large organization of people, but at the end of the day, we spend past them, and there are enough competent people to keep things going. Our F-15s can crush pretty much anything they have to offer, let alone our 187 F-22s. On top of that, we have a huge number of troops with actual combat experience, and even though it would be in a totally different theater, that still counts for a lot.

I'm not sure I buy your comment about generals. Generals are more politicized than they should be, but I don't know of any mass elimination of crack generals during the Bush administration. Besides that, it's been six years since the end of the Bush administration. There's been a lot of time for a lot of commanders with actual combat experience to rise through the ranks. And at the end of the day, we succeeded pretty well against a pretty meaningless and and unachievable objective. We did a hell of a lot better than the Russians did anyways.

Furthermore, no one has fought a real power since World War II. No one has had the balls to commit to a war that might go full scale nuclear. That's why no one really want to get involved with Russia. They'd get easily destroyed conventionally, but they can still take the world with them.

In the end Putin looses, because military strength doesn't matter, and he's just going to invite more sanctions which make Russia even more economically irrelevant than it is now. And he can't really do anything else, because he's built his popularity by pandering to mouth breathing Russo-philes, who think military posturing somehow matters at all. This is concerning in the long run, because an economically destabilized power with thousands of nuclear weapons is a scary thing, but in the short and medium term the writing is pretty much on the wall. No one really gives a **** about Ukraine, so they will probably get screwed over, and Russia will probably go around and bully the small list of non-NATO irrelevant satellite countries and make the world unwilling to do business with them. Europe will probably bite the bullet and accelerate the restructuring of their energy markets, and that will be that.

U.S. destroying $enemy in a conventional war has been irrelevant since 1945.

With the exception of Grenada and Panama in the 1980s, maybe. Freedom has been served, fill your breakfast needs with MANIFEST DESTINOS !

what a simple and straightforward prognostication!

This is a pretty cool thread and there are many parts of it I'd love to comment on but I'll just dip in and see what happens. My Massassi withdrawals passed so long ago that I don't even realize that I'm not checking in.

As to us (the US) destroying Russia, disregarding Jon`C's obvious and valid MAD point, ain't happening. Sure, we have the most toys and the biggest guns (figuratively) but beyond our numerical and technical advantages I just don't think the average American service member has the heart and hardiness to persevere and win in a fight against Russia in Europe. Of course we would certainly get some hardy Canadians and Brits but their number would be few and they would have to always be wary of us accidentally shooting at them. WWII ended as "humanely" as it did because we took extreme measures. Today, those sorts of measures would result in an extreme end.

Jon`C's first post here is really the one I'd like to discuss the most but I know I can't keep up with it here in the forum. There would certainly be a lot of agreement but there are somethings I either strongly disagree with or need to further discuss to see what he means, such as Obama being a hawk.

To elaborate on that, if we consider much of Obama's middle east policy I can see validity in those that criticized Bush's policy as one that would destabilize the region. Although I really don't believe this, for those that say all of these guys are the same it is very hard to argue against the point. Going into Iraq did create a disruption. I remember when The Dark Knight came out and there were discussions about the issues raised in the film and the administration. Well, it seems that Iraq turned into Arkham City and the maniacs were loose. Of course after failing to negotiate SOFA, we left and Obama claimed a big victory. I guess I can keep this Batman thing going because it seems to me that in the films crime soared when he disappeared. I think I'll watch those this weekend. But I digress. I remember that after that there was an uprising in Iran. To me this whole thing is reminiscent of the Kurds in Kuwait that we supposedly told, "rise up and we will support you." They did, we didn't, didn't really go so well for them. For years we were told that was our messages to the Iranians was the same. Unfortunately, it appears our reaction when they did was also the same. Well, what could we (or, rather, the current administration) have done? Oh, I don't know, maybe exactly what Obama did when there were uprisings in Egypt and Libya. So we passively, actively, or both assist in overthrowing brutal dictatorship thugs that aren't causing us problems but don't do a damn similar thing in Iran? Interesting.

I only really brought all of that up because if we are to say Obama is hawkish I can certainly find examples of him being so but not in a way I agree is appropriate but not hawkish in the manner and time I think he should be.

As a side note and something to discuss later if warranted is I can make a case for how Clinton was better than GWB for the military for all the wrong reasons but I don't want to make this too much more TLDR. I'll try to check back.