Predicting Future War Trends, Alliance Systems, Willingness to Fight, Armageddon Potentials (not likely for 50+ years even though War is a virtual certainty)

Greetings Friends, this is mostly from a question my Dad asked and I answered in like 20 different short ways but I'll try to consolidate that here a bit. The above map is an okay representation of current geopolitics though south america should be green and Indonesia/India/Malaysia should also be green; Australia is blue for the time being but probably not after the Philippines fall/accede to China whenever that is (25-75 years). We are in a state where there is mass militarization in the places where war is most likely to happen therefore war will happen (and there's somewhere around 8 wars going on right now or on the cusp of going on in some cases); however the alliance systems in place do not lead to a chain reaction of death and destruction like the first and second World Wars; even if a NATO country was directly attacked most likely they would only receive military support and maybe aerial support, so just a little bit more involved than in Ukraine; also if the war in Taiwan had not started by then there might still be a perceived interest in pursuing a stalemate instead of a total victory (which seems to be the default conclusion of every modern conflict except for Azerbaijan/Armenia where one side clearly won)...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... As to Taiwan the war is extremely likely because of mass militarization and also demographics, China has reached the point where they don't need to get richer and being richer doesn't enhance their prestige much but winning or even having a partial military success against the US is an enormous prestige boost for them and a lot of the education system in China inspires young people to be interested in things like Nationalism and belief in the National Idea/Willingness to fight in the army; anything that reinforces those notions greatly strengthens China further. In the West there is a very minimal interest in these sorts of things because fundamentally the system was built on the lie/false belief/stupidity to think that the entire world would embrace western values, trade freely forever, and allow resources from poorer countries to gradually be siphoned to richer countries forever (and then be consolidated in the hands of a few hundred people mostly). To put it bluntly Singular Globalization died with COVID and has continued to die afterward but there are now multiple trading hubs and throughroutes for shipping and so forth so that there actually multiple models of globalization which is generally the way forward................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Apologies if the previous paragraph sounded Marxist as I've become less and less Marxist over time, I no longer perceive Capitalism as the evil itself but rather foolish and terrible academic and political systems where everyone buys into the same notions without questioning them; the cult following of the Francis Fukuyama End of History narrative which was always specious but maybe true for 5-10 years and just an outright fabrication after that point. Essentially every academic that has a decent point of view on foreign relations is from 30 years ago because that's when diplomacy actually existed, it wasn't just "you accept our values and get slightly richer, we get a lot richer, thanks" which has been the case for at least 20 years and is now falling apart entirely. The mass exportation of values worldwide concept was just a trusted aspect of socialization for decades so now everyone thinks that there is one specific way that everyone should feel about every social issue (or one of two different ways in a bipolar political system), and that somehow this should apply to every country in every situation throughout time. This is just an unbelievably foolish, even utopian ideal that isn't applicable to reality and probably never was, sure China would take your investment but they wouldn't care what dumbass shit you were spewing with it; they just wanted to get wealthier..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................So we're left with a situation where China is essenitally in an unlosable position, it's just a matter of how fast they want to move; do they let 600-700 million people die off in the Age Pyramid before witnessing ascendancy or just wait for things to naturally go their way. Unfortunately I don't think the latter is even remotely likely currently; but with some Nixon-esque diplomacy if some thunderbolt from heaven descended on a mass of incompetent dipshits in the political system it's probably not a completely unfixable situation at least as of 2023; that seems farcically unlikely so we can just assume that Taiwan will be invaded and the US will not have 50,000 missiles in Okinawa to shoot down every LST (Amphibious Assault Ships) before it can reach the shore; if all China does is get a beachhead and hold it they've essentially done enough to damage US prestige; the frozen conflict state is default as expressed before so having nominal control over Taiwan with some resistance is probably pretty likely and then 5-10 years after that they attempt to remove US influence from the Philippines. China doesn't want to conquer anything that's not Taiwan as far as I can tell but they do want nominal trade/sphere of influence control over basically every country between China and India (possible Australia or New Zealand could be exempt); this will probably happen naturally before 2100 but based on current trends it will be decided by war and not slower more methodical diplomacy, if that even exists anymore.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................All of that said China Vs Taiwan/US/Japan is a localized conflict and probably wouldn't result in further wars elsewhere, fairly small theater and the fanciest weapons ever used being thrown at each other to see who wins; Taiwan will suffer immensely but non Taiwanese casualties will be "light" compared to Ukraine and the purge of Palestine (though heavy compared to Iraq and Afghanistan); once that was happens I think other wars will happen elsewhere because of lack of US ability to intervene or even wave a finger and also just the global norms of conflict have already reverted to the Pre-WWI state. Nuclear weapons exist but their usage is not in living memory so someone will have to use them again if they're going to function as a deterrent, conventional war is brutal and horrible but not as intolerable as everyone dying instantly so no amount of conventional force would function as a true deterrent between peers.

Artillery Production Incentives (Ukraine, Russia, Every Country that Borders Russia, Why would China want to supply Artillery Ammunition to Russia logic path

Greetings Friends, I've been watching a decent amount of Perun videos of late which are mostly focused on logistics vis-a-vis modern militaries and the War in Ukraine especially; but in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zcUe47xerQ toward the end he seems to have meandered, briefly, into an interesting point; what is the logical incentive for China to supply Russia with ammunition; is it to ensure Russia doesn't fail or succeeds or to have any direct impact on the war (unlikely) or is it to build up and sustain their own industrial production of ammunition for future conflicts. This is most assuredly going to happen in every country that has an eastern border with Russia or Belarus (So Finland, Poland, the Baltic States etc.); but China itself may simply want more ammunition even of shorter distance variety at some point in the future. So by supplying Russia with ammunition now they are developing engineers and factories for future wartime production; thus pre-emptively taking advantage of a "War Boom" production model. All of that being said everything points to stalemate in Ukraine aside from potential Russian Civil War randomly negating that which went back to being kind of unlikely but hard/impossible to tell.

Things to Write a Book About, Geopolitics, Philosophy, Introspection and So Forth

Greetings Friends, Another riveting blog post. Lately my brothers have been telling me to write my thoughts down in some form and hope that someone eventually reads them, probably like 150 years in the future. So here we are. I guess we'll leave the topic of the impossibility of exposure for another time (though I have manifold methods of proving that side of the argument). The easy straightforward things to write about are the state of geopolitics and how it is changing rapidly post covid; a related topic is how mass militarization with no obvious deterrent must unerringly lead to conflict between Great Powers (or minor powers), how said deterrent can not develop without actual battlefield usage (according to Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley this would probably the prophesized Doom Drone that has such conventional firepower to deter all means of fighting it a la the Way of the Pilgrim by Gordon R. Dickson), and on to more philosophical topics. ..................................................................................................................................................................................................... Last week I took off thursday from work since my brain was sharply deteriorating into nothingness, I went and dealt with a bank situation to make my sister happy and then walked to the book store to buy Marcus Aurelius' The Meditations and then read it on a bench in an isolated park-like environment which wasn't there when I was a child. The main philosophical point I have is relevant to big data essentially, it's something like Determinism can be proven through statistics and data analysis, so you can have a perfect consumption model, marketing model, as well as opinion pacification models; more or less what large companies are trying to do but failing at and not really setting restraints on to prevent mass inflation worldwide (except for the US) which would invariably lead to problems via kicking the can down the road; I hold that this is mostly a philosophical notion and while it has many practical applications it needs to be tangled with in the philosphical environment first in order to get to a functionally utilitarian worldview instead of a purely profit based one. Another philosophical point which my brain just phrased a few minutes ago is the Transient nature of Perspective, which is a model of self awareness essentially and relevant to Marcus Aurelius hence the image header; basically your perspective shifts as you age but the perspective you held when younger is not necessarily more or less wrong than your current perspective; there are exceptions to the rule but for the vast majority of people shifts in perspective do not invalidate the previous point of view or whether or not it ever had merit. If you want to simplify all truths to some universal set of values to export so that you can ensure more and more funds reside in the wealthiest countries and especially small numbers of people while maintaining everyone else's status quo standard of living then it is to your benefit to also oversimplify concepts such as traditionalism vs progressivism making one out to be irrevocably worse than the other and so forth; but if you want to maintain perspective it behooves you to try to understand and work with the other point of view instead of bombarding it into oblivion via cancellation or actual MLRS systems.

On Delegation (The Core US Military Strategy) and Future Military Conflicts

Greetings friends, So we have another burst of inspiration here this time on core strategic and tactical principles in the US Military and how they interact with the modern military thesis vis-a-vis Ukraine, Taiwan, and the Philippines. A very prevalent thought in the US Military is delegation which works extremely well for small tactical groups from JEB Stuart to the Navy Seals but does not aid in overall strategic decision making or willingness to finish a long, bloody (and potentially tedious) campaign successfully, as evidenced by the failures in Vietnam and Afghanistan. This doctrine is older than WWII but WWII was not fought in this vein especially and the Korean War also wasn't (probably due to Macarthur's influence), I suspect the Korean War would not have been a stalemate if the general strategic outlook was focused on small tactical units and so on instead of a series of massive battles a la WWII; most likely North Korea would have won decisively. So in a roundabout way I guess I'm defending Macarthur here despite the silliness of nuking China.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... In the case of Ukraine we do have delegation working successfully (at least at the moment, 4/13/2023) but there is also a cohesive strategic military objective on the part of the Ukranians that is working in their favor so despite the massive losses on both sides and the warfare style not seen for 65-70 years (and the diplomacy not seen for over a hundred); the case of of the Kharkiv offensive is generally where you can see delegation working well again reminiscent of a Civil War small unit campaign; in general the war is very similar in scope to the US Civil War, there's also the notions of brother vs brother as well as we must defend to survive and massive casualties with trench warfare; but for the time being the war is still going relatively well for Ukraine; time will tell whether that is the final conclusion or not.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. As far as Taiwan there is definitely a much more jingoistic approach from the media and the Presidency/administration focusing on the threat that China poses but I don't think there is a particularly strong willingness to fight and die personally for individuals born in the post 9/11 world; especially not compared to China (or India) who have a roughly 70% willingess to fight compared to the US' 44% (2015 Gallup Poll); ultimately China and Russia are not especially comparable as opponents because one is a transcendent power and the other is a clearly declining (especially demographically) power. If China simply waits like 10-20 years then they may get Taiwan without fighting, however there is enormous prestige on the line were they to win a war, essentially completely disconnecting the European and American apparatus from the rest of the world (or at least the non Western hemisphere, it does seem like Brasil is more likely to align with the "Global South" (formerly phrased as "Third World") and probably splitting the world into two or three globalization economic spheres instead of just one. China can't really get more economically powerful but they can certainly get more militarily powerful, strategically powerful, and prestigiously powerful; so their objective set will likely be more reflect of Putin's world view then the post Cold War world view (which obviously has proven inaccurate at this point)................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... At present the odds of American/Taiwanese victory in a defensive conflict are fairly high, as much as 80%; but even if the event that China lost the war they would probably be willing to go again whereas the US losing multiple Aircraft Carriers and say 20,000 men would have a devestating effect on the home front; but even if China lost 200k-300k soldiers that's still a relatively small part of their population and they have the cohesive societal outlook necessary for a longer, bloodier campaign (as does Russia incidentally though possibly not the raw resources or manpower); after China does acquire Taiwan in some way (which might take 25 years and may or may not be extremely bloody or bloodless) they will almost certainly go after the Phillippines immediately (which they are already making plays at it in diplomatic/economic ways) because the Philippines are the linchpin of the entire Pacific Theater just as they were in WWII; the Philippines are the most important strategic piece of territory in the world by far and thus will continue to be a conflict center between Great Powers moving forward; it is abundantly clear that this kind of conflict is very real and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future just as it had been for hundreds of years before 1989.

Ranking the Top 10 Movies Per Decade Since the 1960s (Mental Exercise)

Greetings sillies,

This is purely a mental exercise for my own enjoyment, the only parameter is that I've seen the movie in question but it could be fun to look at in 20-30 years assuming no nuclear apocalypse. My Top 5 movies as of this writing are Unforgiven, Taxi Driver, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Seven Samurai, and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. 1960's: 1. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly 2. Once Upon a Time in the West 3. Dr. Strangelove 4. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 5. Cool Hand Luke 6. West Side Story 7. The Apartment 8. Sanjuro 9. A Fistful of Dollars 10. Goldfinger.................................................................................................................... 1970's: 1. Taxi Driver 2. French Connection 3. The Deer Hunter 4. Josey Wales 5. The Sting 6. Silver Streak 7. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest 8. Alien 9. Chinatown 10. Monty Python and the Holy Grail.................................................................................................................. 1980's: 1. The Princess Bride 2. Once Upon a Time in America 3. The Shining 4. Blue Velvet 5. Raging Bull 6. The Untouchables 7. The Terminator 8. Robocop 9. Die Hard 10. Willow............................................................................................................................ 1990's: 1. Unforgiven 2. Total Recall 3. Starship Troopers 4. Terminator 2 5. Goodfellas 6. The Usual Suspects 7. The Truman Show 8. Reservoir Dogs 9. Groundhog Day 10. Shawshank Redemption................................................................................................ 2000's: 1. No Country For Old Men 2. There Will Be Blood 3. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans 4. The Fellowship of the Ring 5. The Prestige 6. In Bruges 7. Oldboy 8. Training Day 9. The Dark Knight 10. Road to Perdition................................................................................................................... 2010's: 1. Mad Max Fury Road 2. Blade Runner 2049 3. Parasite 4. Edge of Tomorrow 5. Logan 6. Inception 7. Mud 8. Shape of Water 9. Annihilation 10. Sorry to Bother You.................................................................................................................. 2020's: ??? Dune, Top Gun, Banshees in some order I suppose........................................................................................................................ I did write reviews for a decent number of the 2010s movies, 80s and 90s I can come up with like 25 that are worthy but arbitrary restrictions and what not.

A Refutation of Alexander Stubb vis a vis Short, Medium, Long Term Scenarios following the ongoing War in Ukraine

Greetings Friends,

This is predominantly just a resposne to this video:

I will say in general Prime Minister Stubb's work has been very informative and interesting especially in the early days of the war and I'll also say that my particular understanding of the war has declined somewhat over time as information has become more and more propagandized and harder to parse on a literal level. The best source for information on Ukraine by far is Colonel Marcus Reisner's videos for the Theresan Military Academy (an institution older than the United States); but his videos too have become more infrequent of late. As far as the current situation in Ukraine it does seem to be favoring the Ukrainians but moreso in a WWI ebb and flow sort of way; the line is moving but not very quickly and a lot of the territory being fought over has changed hands multiple times in the course of the conflict............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ This style of fighting leads to tremendous casualty rates so assuming the war goes for at least another year we're probably looking at another 250,000 deaths or so, possibly many more than that (general estimates are already in the vicinity of US casualties in the Vietnam War; but doubled since they're on both sides); this is still a war of attrition; Ukraine has the morale and clear intelligence advantages but Russia still has an overwhelming advantage in terms of sheer firepower. I guess it should be noted that any intervention on the part of NATO would easily conflict instantly assuming no immmediate nuclear response from Russia, though this has been true for the entire conflict and it is essentially a proxy war for Nato and the US; we'll send you munitions and you Ukrainians can die for us; well fought kind sirs thanks............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... As far as general strategic suggestions Ukraine can probably win the war within the next 3 months if they simply go into Russia; Russia is not prepared for this and most of their supply depots are within like 100 km of the front line in Russia; all Ukraine has to do is seize or destroy those depots and the Russians will fold at least on the eastern front very quickly; probably causing a cascading loss except for territory held before the war started. I don't think the chance of Russian Nuclear response changes if you do this as opposed to simply very slowly winning the war through pure attrition; you've probably got like a 10-15% chance of being nuked either way, this is just an expedient method of figuring out whether that will happen. I also don't think there should be any moral issue with entering Russian territory; Ukraine has already attacked Russian Territory directly so having troops there for a couple weeks is not really a big deal, it doesn't change who the aggressor is but nonetheless NATO and the US would not approve so they will not follow an optimal strategy in this case................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ On to Stubb's video; he presents Short, Medium, and Long term prospects but only one variation of each; at the start of the war Stubb and others were discussing many different potential outcomes but now the only outcome discussed is Ukrainian victory (by no means guaranteed at this point, certainly not the total victory and retaking of Crimea that seem to be the envisioned points); so that's the first weakness of the video................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ For Medium he addresses regime change, I do think if Russia loses the war in humiliating fashion there will be regime change but anything in between there probably will not be unless Putin dies of natural causes (should be noted that whoever replaces Putin will probably have Putin's foreign policy a la the United States inheriting foreign policy between presidencies regardless of political alignment); which can't be an anticipated outcome. He also lightly touches on Russia becoming a democracy; unless Russia is invaded and Moscow occupied (a laughable scenario) this is not going to happen................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ For Long Term the things discussed are more practical and relevant, especially if you're looking into investing in BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Huntington Ingalls etc. in Eastern Europe no matter what happens in the war, whether it ends or not there will be a massive military buildup focusing on drones and artillery and that will likely be the case for the next 25-50 years; that kind of buildup tends to lead to war in the future but it could theoretically simply become another Cold War as is often discussed. In Asia we are probably getting a hot war at some point and assuming China succeeds another one after that so ship building companies and naval infrastructure companies are also interesting to look at in that regard. The academic thought that everyone will magically embrace all Western Traditions and values and there will be mystical peace and harmony universally worshipping at the throne of capitalism and globalization is decisively dead and a split or multiple splits with economic spheres of influence will replace it; that doesn't mean all world spanning trade will cease but more reliance on closer trading partners is the presumed outcome.

The Strategic and Economic Implications of the New Cold War and the Spheres of Influence created by it

Greetings Friends, I guess this would theoretically be another email to write but I don't really anyone to write to so I'll just send it to the void of the internet instead; maybe someone will plagiarize it and do something useful with this information or something. So It is kind of stupid to call the present global situation a cold war when there is a hot war (the hottest war since Korea or Vietnam pretty much) going on but that's the closest terminology that we have. A lot of people have suggested that the primary result is the regionalization of globalization; i.e. the entire world will not participate in one global economic system instead they will choose to participate in one of two or three economic global systems; in the short term this will likely cause a recession and exarcerbate the inflation caused by speculative investments (cryptocurrency mostly) and the war itself; in the long term I don't really think it must be bad or even is likely to be bad on a basic level. Having two giant competing economic systems will probably create much faster innovative technologies and so forth overall (a la the Space Race)....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Unfortunately I think a big focus of those technologies will be militarily based. Since the war in Ukraine has devolved into an attrition based artillery duel and Russia fires 10-20 times as many shells as Ukraine there should theoretically be a requirement by each government on Russia's border to both bolster their artillery technology itself and the reserve of simple ammunition and related resources just in anticipation of future wars. This is very similar to the pre WWI arms race and also the alliance systems created at the time; it does not guarantee a larger major war but it does imply a high likelihood of that happening. I think the only way to stop such a war is place nuclear weapons in all of those countries essentially (which winds up being around 60% of Europe having "Defensive" Nuclear Weapons in them, possibly more than the Cold War but I'm not entirely sure on that front).................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... The other primary focus of military technology that we've learned from the war is that Tanks are no longer offensively viable and drones are the king of the battlefield; this is the same exact thing that happened in Nagorno-Karabakh so we need a new Clausewitz of Drones to emerge to dictate the theoretical strategy in that regard. One thing I've pushed since the early 2000s is that active defense can probably win conflicts in 10-1 or 20-1 odds situations; this apparently has become a more mainstream train of thought (I don't exactly know why but it probably has something to do with Fallujah like battles and so forth); but if the notion of defense being considerably stronger than offense becomes the popular train of thought by military analysts it virtually necessitates a massive arms race of defensive technology both Artillery based and Drone Based; Aircraft is too expensive to develop, use, and maintain (and also hasn't really played a huge role in Ukraine so far) so only superpowers can do so; ergo you fall back on cheaper options. ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... It appears that the urban city is the best fortification in the present world and only countries that are willing to completely flatten them with ungodly amounts of artillery shells can really negate that (still at great expense); so will urbanization itself become a means of fortification in the future? Interesting concept; if you read Ralph D. Sawyer's Ancient Chinese Warfare he talks about this same thing happening thousands of years ago which why China has like 300 cities with over a million people in them now and also gigantic ancient city walls a la the Theodosian Walls in Constantinople.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... It should be noted that all of this implies that offensive wars are very difficult to succeed with unless the opponent is vastly inferior on every technological front; globalization itself has sort of flattened the technological curve worldwide so those sorts of advantages simply won't exist in the future on land (Air and Sea Based Wars can still be dictated by the superior technological force, of course said wars will almost certainly be between two extremely powerful countries in the vicinity of the Philippines); so this would be another suggestion of a Cold War, not a MAD based Cold War because Nuclear Weapons are just not on the table for most nations (Russia may have used Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine had they been pushed back, since that didn't happen it would strictly be a taboo breaking maneuver which doesn't seem that profitable in the long run).................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Aside for whatever reason the paragraph breaks aren't working for this post so I just put periods instead.