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GIVEN CURRENT WARS, F-35s ARE BETTER CHOICE THAN MORE F-22As
On Jun 19, 2:24 am, "Michael Shirley" wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:19:11 -0700, eatfastnoodle wrote: Actually, China has huge internal problem to overcome before it can go out and compete with the US on a global scale. If the US and China could work something out on Taiwan, I don't think conflict between China and the US is inevitable. (assuming Korean peninsula doesn't blow). The thorny issue is always Taiwan, for China, giving up Taiwan is simply a political impossibility, for the US, allow China to take over Taiwan would mean the beginning of the end of American dominance in East Asia. (anybody controls Taiwan would also control Japan's oil lifeline, if China took over Taiwan, the foundation of American Asian strategy: US-Japanese alliance would be shaken to its very core). Very true. I also think that the Chinese are running against a clock that makes them think that exporting problems on bayonets is easier than solving them at home. Their water's polluted, their arable land is shrinking, desertification is growing, they've got a failure of the One Child Policy and they're overproducing males out of balance with females as a result. The economic growth curve is outstripping the population curve and they're starting to see what a paradigm/reality mismatch is all about as they discover the limitations of a highly centralised government in a dynamic society where change happens faster than they can get the reports on what happened yesterday. If I were on the Standing Committee of the Politburo, that would scare the living crap out of me. And the number of really big projects like the Three Gorges Dam that isn't even finished yet but which is starting to suffer from silting, has got to be causing some panic. Hu Jintao started out as a civil engineer specializing in water projects and dams and even with that kind of expert knowledge at the top, the problems are increasingly insoluable for the guys in Beijing. So increasingly, external military policies, (something that has always wound up being ruinous to the Chinese in the end) are looking better and better, while the local problems become something that they'd just as soon avoid. So, I think that we're going to see a period of optional adventurism in Beijing's future and that's bad for us, especially since we really can't afford a war with those people. Even if our overdependant on Chinese trade economy would survive it, the fact of the matter is that neither our industrial base nor our education system will support it. We need to go tactical defensive/strategic offensive in our actions, and a lot of that needs to revolve around soft power while being militarily unprovocative. We don't, in the crude vernacular of our times, need our politicians to be writing a check with their elephant mouths that our humming bird asses can't cash. In short, we need to change the game, because the one we're playing is gonna get our nose bloodied. All the Chinese need to do in order to win is simply not lose, and our own best option is not to play. Lets let Beijing expend their capital, both economic and political for awhile while we rebuild our industrial base, clean out our universities and other schools and generally start behaving like we still want to be around in 2050, by which time the Adventurists in Beijing will have spent their capital. If they want to have fun trying to police an empire in Africa, lets let them bleed to death doing it. Things might even improve a little bit over there. -- "Implications leading to ramifications leading to shenanigans"-- Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, USN. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/20...ef_cites_d.php CoS USAF, Gates differ |
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