Venezuela

[Gergar12]

The tech oligarchs are talking out of both sides of their mouths and are fighting hard to sell their technology to China even while they complain about China's tech dominance.

Just look at Nvidia and how they've been lobbying the Trump administration to let them sell their best GPUs to China.

Nvidia's CEO also proclaims they are a Taiwanese company when in Taiwan. A reason they want to make more GPUs is to slow down Chinese developers of equivalent GPUs.

Sure, they want to take Taiwan, they've wanted to take it since 1949, but if it will trigger massive retaliation, then they won't. Should they be certain that the US (et al) won't defend Taiwan, you do not want to be in Taiwan at that time. Until then, Taiwan is relatively safe.

I don't think so, I think China's demographic problems, and the US rise in military spending and population will only mean time is on the US's side, not theirs.

Even if they struck the oil refineries, that's not some decisive ending blow. It's not good, it's not nothing, but it's not a winning move. And there's no way to capitalize on that sort of opening move, so it's just fodder for speculation, not a serious concern.

China capitalizes on it by the US deploying more units to Texas, and the American South, vs sending them near the western Pacific.

 

[crimson5pheonix]

China capitalizes on it by the US deploying more units to Texas, and the American South, vs sending them near the western Pacific.

Complete fantasy land. They have no way to deploy a significant amount of troops in America.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Nvidia's CEO also proclaims they are a Taiwanese company when in Taiwan. A reason they want to make more GPUs is to slow down Chinese developers of equivalent GPUs.

Utter bullshit. The reason that the Nvidia CEO wants to sell to China is because China is a big market that they can make a bunch of money on now, and he really doesn't much care about the future because he knows the AI bubble is going to pop so he wants to sell as many GPUs at as high a price as possible before it does and China is willing to pay top dollar.

China capitalizes on it by the US deploying more units to Texas, and the American South, vs sending them near the western Pacific.

And why would more troops be deployed to Texas and the American South? Lets say Texas does get attacked (already a massive stretch). China will have expended their ability to attack that region of the US in one shot. After that there's no point in moving troops to the area because how would China attack again? How would they get to Texas and the American south? Magic? You think hundreds of Chinese warships are going to go through the Panama Canal? Are they all going to completely circumnavigate South America? If Texas was to get attacked it would be a one and done, kind of like Japan attacking Pearl Harbor, because the logistics to do it again simply don't make a lick of sense. Again, completely delusional.

 

[Satinavian]

Yes, China simply can't run supply lines to Venezuela in a war situation with the US. People always forget that China simply does not have global power projection like the US does. If those two ever go to war and it doesn't escalate to ICBMs, that war will happen near China, with at most some covert sabotage actions in the US mainland.

So No, "The US needed to do it for security to prevent Chinese attacks via Venezuela" is an utterly unbelievable pretense. Not that, even if there was anything to it, it would make the attack justified.


What we see is absolutely nothing but the US attacking another country to steal its ressources and make it a colony, nominally administered by some puppet. It is as if we were 150 years back. And the US will get away with it because it is so strong no one is willing to pick a fight. And Trump just made noise about doing the same to other American countries as well, so it is just regular empire building via force.

------------------

As for Taiwan : Trump wants the world to return to spheres of influence. If the US can rule both Americas, then Russia can do what it wants in Europa and China in Eastern Asia. That is his vision for the future.
And he doesn't value chips nearly as much as oil. He always goes on about oil. He is willing to also claim rare earth minerals when the tech bros say they need them, but he wants them getting used for production only in the US, not in Taiwan.

 

[Agema]

If Trump repeats this with Greenland there might be a problem they haven't considered: Healthcare.

Depriving Greenland's citizens of healthcare and forcing them to risk getting destitute whenever they get something worse than the flue is just going to increase public discontent at the occupation and makes the region harder to control.

Dude, Greenland only has a population of a few tens of thousands.

The USA will just flood it with Americans until the native Greenlanders are a minority in their own land, and then they can be rigorously ignored and shit upon just like any native North Americans (or indeed as the Greenlanders themselves used to be ignored and shit upon by the Danes).

 

[Agema]

Utter bullshit. The reason that the Nvidia CEO wants to sell to China is because China is a big market that they can make a bunch of money on now,

There's some truth in what Gergar is saying. If there's one way surefire way to encourage competition, it's to stop customers accessing your company's stuff.

 

[Satinavian]

Sure, but NVidia only cares because that would threaten its market share and the spectre of cheap and powerful Chinese GPUs on the world market is even worse. This is not about US interests, only their own.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Dude, Greenland only has a population of a few tens of thousands.

The USA will just flood it with Americans until the native Greenlanders are a minority in their own land, and then they can be rigorously ignored and shit upon just like any native North Americans (or indeed as the Greenlanders themselves used to be ignored and shit upon by the Danes).

If they are lucky. How many people in the US has ICE disappeared?

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

If they are lucky. How many people in the US has ICE disappeared?

We'll need plenty of warm bodies in our US-run Venezuelan oil field labor camps

 

[crimson5pheonix]

I don't what to file this under, other than schadenfreude.

 

[Chimpzy]

We'll need plenty of warm bodies in our US-run Venezuelan oil field labor camps

There are 1.6 million volunteers of Venezuelan origin/descent in the US that can serve that purpose.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

I don't what to file this under, other than schadenfreude.

I mean, we already knew how tender Trump's ego is, but the fact that they're saying it out loud....

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

I don't what to file this under, other than schadenfreude.

 

[Mister Mumbler]

Complete fantasy land.

Again, completely delusional.

God, I have to say, truly, thank you to you two for your efforts here. As someone who probably has about as much love as Gerg does for all things that whoosh and boom, but also happens to actually know a thing or two about it for real instead, it hurts watching the amount of silly shot he says on this topic, both here and on the further forums at large, and I thank you both again for your service.

It's utterly been wasted though, because not ONLY is he both too dug into his own opinions on the subject (look into his profile and past comments on this forum and you will find me, yes me, having fought with him already over his continued insistence that WWIII was going to happen, and happen both 1) in or around Taiwan and 2) was basically just going to be a big, WWII style dust up that ends in nuclear fire. This was years ago now), he's also genuinely too stupid to actually understand and know about both actual, real military hardware/tactics, or even how they are employed beyond surface level, Wikipedia and YouTube induced wunder-waffe shit.

Case in point to drive this home? Everyone else sped past this tiny point he brought up yesterday that got lost in the shuffle (which is fair because Jesus yesterday sucked) perfectly illustrated how out of touch he is and it's this one, tiny mention that sinks everything:

IRBM missiles bases in South America.

And do you want to know why this is so...just...fucking trivially stupid?

It is the year of whoever the fuck is asleep at the wheel up there 2026, and be both thinks it's the mid-'60's, and Missile Crisis electric Boogaloo, which, sure, might be scary to think about and imagine, but for one, tiny, utterly impossible to miss detail if you know your stuff (for real, and with logic surrounding it lasting longer than a quick wiki wander. And even just the raw brain power to put it together to begin with), point, and is thus:

Do you know WHY the world doesn't fall apart over the idea of missile bases anymore, least of all nuclear tipped ones?

One

Fucking

Word.

And it's old as shit and from turn of the fucking century;

And that simple thing is...

A sub.

A fucking submarine.

Because do you know what most subs are these days, at least the big, bad, boats that all the major naval powers secretly fear because they KNOW the danger they pose.

Because THEY ALSO FULLY KNOW THIS. IN THEIR BONES, BECAUSE THEY ALSO BUILD THOSE SAME BOATS!

WHY!?!?!

Because, a modern missile sub is, quite literally, just an IRBM base that is that most insidious trifecta of pure malice needed to both, not only START nuclear armageddon, but actually, insanely enough, try and fully win the resulting skirmish: floats on water (important when your planet surface is mostly that), can in those former places operate under it's surface (to escape all those pesky spy planes and satellite network designed to counter specifically this final last point) and armed with enough nukes for a single boat to be able to launch a *sucker-punch style* strike at the 'enemy' (y'know, before the enemy does the same with their incredibly similarly designed boats).

There's a reason Cuba was the last time too: because, not too much longer after, some fucking ghoul. Somewhere on this planet, figures out how to get those godawful, nascent, full sized ICBMs scaled down enough to fit on an underwater boat.

EDIT: The above is so well known, not only was there a trashy, pulp military tech/drama thriller based on this idea, they turned it into a fucking movie, complete with Alec Baldwin and James Earl Jones.
The Hunt For The Red October (which has to have been a book gerg has read and utterly missed the point of too, lol)

EDIT 2: Changed 'decapitation' to more accurate term 'sucker-punch (or your own flavor of it such as a cowards punch, etc) because it flows better and is still as accurate as the original (the suckered punch is, hoped by these same madmen, to be the quick win to WWIII all these same nutjobs think they are smart and tricky enough to pull off (and they will never be, hopefully. Smartest move not to play at all, y'know?))

 

[Thaluikhain]

Because, a modern missile sub is, quite literally, just an IRBM base that is that most insidious trifecta of pure malice needed to both, not only START nuclear armageddon, but actually, insanely enough, win the resulting skirmish: floats on water (important when your planet surface is mostly that), can in those former places operate under it's surface (to escape all those pesky spy planes and satellite network designed to counter specifically this final last point) and armed with enough nukes for a single boat to be able to launch a decapitation strike at the 'enemy' (y'know, before the enemy does the same with their incredibly similarly designed boats).

A SSBN can also launch weapons from anywhere in the sea. Which, ok, obvious, but it means that you don't know which direction you should expect an attack from.

Though depending on what you mean by 'decapitation', not sure I agree with that.

 

[Thaluikhain]

OK, you right, so I edited the above, with resulting explanation for it here to further explain my earlier point;

Changed 'decapitation' to more accurate term 'sucker-punch (or your own flavor of it such as a cowards punch, etc) because it flows better and is still as accurate as the original (the suckered punch is, hoped by these same madmen, to be the quick win to WWIII all these same nutjobs think they are smart and tricky enough to pull off (and they will never be, hopefully. Smartest move not to play at all, y'know?)

EDIT: oh, fucking forgot again, my original use of decapitation is also as thus but basically boils down to a target strike both lucrative enough (say, a top military base, a large concentration of man/material, or fuck, even the enemies head of state buildings) and important enough to throw the spicy spear at to ensure a quick efficient win before anyone else gets the bright idea that their own spears are in danger and should, themselves, all be chucked ASAP.

EDIT 2: I will come back around to this thread with a final part 2 to wrap up this thought fully, but just know we will touch on that idea you brought up here (SSBN or rather, the acronym for the class of boats I brought up (big, underwater boats with lots of big missiles tubes))

Ah, ok, then in that I do disagree, SSBNs aren't a guarantee of an effective first strike, but they are very good at ensuring that the enemy doesn't get a first strike on you. They don't need to win the war, just make sure the over side doesn't either, like you (or the old movie Wargames) say, the winning move is not to play.

As an aside, the US, I believe,wasn't going to try decapitation strikes if the Cold War got hot, didn't want to kill the people who could agree to a ceasefire, and didn't want the enemy military suddenly not have any political constraints.

 

[Gergar12]

Complete fantasy land. They have no way to deploy a significant amount of troops in America.

Yes, China simply can't run supply lines to Venezuela in a war situation with the US. People always forget that China simply does not have global power projection like the US does. If those two ever go to war and it doesn't escalate to ICBMs, that war will happen near China, with at most some covert sabotage actions in the US mainland.

So No, "The US needed to do it for security to prevent Chinese attacks via Venezuela" is an utterly unbelievable pretense. Not that, even if there was anything to it, it would make the attack justified.


What we see is absolutely nothing but the US attacking another country to steal its ressources and make it a colony, nominally administered by some puppet. It is as if we were 150 years back. And the US will get away with it because it is so strong no one is willing to pick a fight. And Trump just made noise about doing the same to other American countries as well, so it is just regular empire building via force.

------------------

As for Taiwan : Trump wants the world to return to spheres of influence. If the US can rule both Americas, then Russia can do what it wants in Europa and China in Eastern Asia. That is his vision for the future.
And he doesn't value chips nearly as much as oil. He always goes on about oil. He is willing to also claim rare earth minerals when the tech bros say they need them, but he wants them getting used for production only in the US, not in Taiwan.

No but they can deploy saboteurs or pay some locals to do it. Significant no, but you don't need that, but all it takes is a a ship in the middle of the Panama canal, and the US ships have to go down to South America AKA the long way to tranit to the Pacific.

"Chinese global power projection" - You don't need global power projection to own all the fields near an a base to do ISR on them. You can have proxies, militas, retired nationalistic saling "fishing boats" do it too.

'What we see is absolutely nothing but the US attacking another country to steal its ressources and make it a colony, nominally administered by some puppet. It is as if we were 150 years back. And the US will get away with it because it is so strong no one is willing to pick a fight. And Trump just made noise about doing the same to other American countries as well, so it is just regular empire building via force.'

That was the UK, what the US wants is free trade. The same free trade China has, and any other country has, with competent rulers who don't crash their own oil production while posing as a national security threat with adversarial supplied arms.

China, and Russia ruling Europe, and Asia would cripple the US ability to deter them, the western hemisphere doesn't have the critical mass to counter a China-Russia Eurasia, it didn't happen in the Cold War, and won't happen today. No US president with a competent staff would let that happen. The US will contest them everywhere as much as we can.

If Taiwan falls the first island chain falls, and US forces in the second island chain would be at a threat, plus Trump doesn't like being seen as weak, neither does any other US president.

View attachment 14124

God, I have to say, truly, thank you to you two for your efforts here. As someone who probably has about as much love as Gerg does for all things that whoosh and boom, but also happens to actually know a thing or two about it for real instead, it hurts watching the amount of silly shot he says on this topic, both here and on the further forums at large, and I thank you both again for your service.

It's utterly been wasted though, because not ONLY is he both too dug into his own opinions on the subject (look into his profile and past comments on this forum and you will find me, yes me, having fought with him already over his continued insistence that WWIII was going to happen, and happen both 1) in or around Taiwan and 2) was basically just going to be a big, WWII style dust up that ends in nuclear fire. This was years ago now), he's also genuinely too stupid to actually understand and know about both actual, real military hardware/tactics, or even how they are employed beyond surface level, Wikipedia and YouTube induced wunder-waffe shit.

Case in point to drive this home? Everyone else sped past this tiny point he brought up yesterday that got lost in the shuffle (which is fair because Jesus yesterday sucked) perfectly illustrated how out of touch he is and it's this one, tiny mention that sinks everything:

IRBM missiles bases in South America.

And do you want to know why this is so...just...fucking trivially stupid?

It is the year of whoever the fuck is asleep at the wheel up there 2026, and be both thinks it's the mid-'60's, and Missile Crisis electric Boogaloo, which, sure, might be scary to think about and imagine, but for one, tiny, utterly impossible to miss detail if you know your stuff (for real, and with logic surrounding it lasting longer than a quick wiki wander. And even just the raw brain power to put it together to begin with), point, and is thus:

Do you know WHY the world doesn't fall apart over the idea of missile bases anymore, least of all nuclear tipped ones?

One

Fucking

Word.

And it's old as shit and from turn of the fucking century;

And that simple thing is...

A sub.

A fucking submarine.

Because do you know what most subs are these days, at least the big, bad, boats that all the major naval powers secretly fear because they KNOW the danger they pose.

Because THEY ALSO FULLY KNOW THIS. IN THEIR BONES, BECAUSE THEY ALSO BUILD THOSE SAME BOATS!

WHY!?!?!

Because, a modern missile sub is, quite literally, just an IRBM base that is that most insidious trifecta of pure malice needed to both, not only START nuclear armageddon, but actually, insanely enough, try and fully win the resulting skirmish: floats on water (important when your planet surface is mostly that), can in those former places operate under it's surface (to escape all those pesky spy planes and satellite network designed to counter specifically this final last point) and armed with enough nukes for a single boat to be able to launch a *sucker-punch style* strike at the 'enemy' (y'know, before the enemy does the same with their incredibly similarly designed boats).

There's a reason Cuba was the last time too: because, not too much longer after, some fucking ghoul. Somewhere on this planet, figures out how to get those godawful, nascent, full sized ICBMs scaled down enough to fit on an underwater boat.

EDIT: The above is so well known, not only was there a trashy, pulp military tech/drama thriller based on this idea, they turned it into a fucking movie, complete with Alec Baldwin and James Earl Jones.
The Hunt For The Red October (which has to have been a book gerg has read and utterly missed the point of too, lol)

EDIT 2: Changed 'decapitation' to more accurate term 'sucker-punch (or your own flavor of it such as a cowards punch, etc) because it flows better and is still as accurate as the original (the suckered punch is, hoped by these same madmen, to be the quick win to WWIII all these same nutjobs think they are smart and tricky enough to pull off (and they will never be, hopefully. Smartest move not to play at all, y'know?))

It is literally more expensive to build a submarine armed with just torpedos than it is to build a rocket to outer space. What are you talking about, cost is a consideration.

The Virginia-class, cost over $4 billion per unit, and that's an attack submarine. The Columbia-class the missile firing ones, are even more expensive, with the first hull estimated at $16.1 billion

 

[crimson5pheonix]

Significant no,

You could have stopped there. At that moment you lost the argument. Even adding up all these little inconveniences at once, already an absurd thought, doesn't add up to anything meaningful. A temporary dip in the economy. Certainly nothing approaching "military backed regime change".

 

[Gergar12]

You could have stopped there. At that moment you lost the argument. Even adding up all these little inconveniences at once, already an absurd thought, doesn't add up to anything meaningful. A temporary dip in the economy. Certainly nothing approaching "military backed regime change".

2021 Suez Canal obstruction - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[crimson5pheonix]

2021 Suez Canal obstruction - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Yes, and we all laughed at it for the comedy of it. The damage it realistically caused was minor. You're throwing out all these "scary" scenarios while completely neglecting a very important aspect of military action. Grand strategy. None of these scenarios you put out buys foreign actors anything. They're petty spiteful damaging actions that accomplish nothing of value.