Is revolution coming?
It is always refreshing to hear Brian Berletic talk geopolitics.
Recently, he made an interesting point-- if you didn't know who was president and just looked at policy-- it would seem that US geopolitical policy was continuous and consistent from the year 2000 onwards until today. In other words, policy is not dependent on political personalities or personal styles -- it is an expression of political culture, which evolves slowly.
That indicates that American“democracy” is meaningless. No matter what we do, no matter who we choose to represent us, nothing will change. If you want change, then you need a revolution.
The US has sought peaceful revolution many times - and always failed.
FUBAR
In a separate video Berletic also talked about the US’s Agile Combat Employment (ACE) philosophy, touted as a way to give the US the edge in a war with China, after almost every war games scenario has found China winning and the US losing.
The strategy has actually been around a long time-- since before the Iraq war, with various names.
Since the US has a limited number of large bases in the Asia-Pacific area-- mostly in Japan and Korea-- its resources would be highly vulnerable to the PLA in the case of a war. The ACE idea is to disperse military resources, largely into civilian areas, using the major bases as logistics hubs – and assuming the PLA could not identify missile bases, fighter jets and fighter-bombers and so on beyond those major bases.
If that looks complicated — it is. Which is its first major flaw. FUBAR ….?
The war in Ukraine in particular has shown that the Russians have been able to identify hidden and dispersed military bases rather easily --despite ISR capabilities probably inferior to those of the Chinese, whose capabilities have advanced so far that the US talks about the “Chinese ISR Revolution” and the “Chinese Kill Mesh”.
Just moving resources “offsite” from the main bases, and supplying them and communicating with them would be hard to do effectively, harder to hide, and inevitably invite devastating precision strikes with little change of defense.
In addition, the host countries would be foolish to allow their territory to be used in such a way. For a war with their best trading partner?
Ummm… FUBAR!
In the case of Japan, that is certainly not what the Japanese signed up for!
The US Japan Defense Treaty is just that – a defense treaty – not an offense treaty. And the Japanese constitution limits the Japanese military to defense only.
Nor would South Korea like to become a target, close as it is to China, North Korea, and Russia.
War Games
Americans love video games. The military do, too.
A pity that real war is not like that.
Berletic thinks the US sees Chinese maritime shipping is vulnerable since its naval assets are tasked with local defense.
But China can target US maritime assets – both civilian and military— throughout the Pacific, if not in other oceans with a very useful submarine fleet.
The Real Question
The real question, however, is: how willing are the American people to suffer massive casualties and destruction of cities and homes, for the first time since the Civil War?
Any strikes on Chinese civilian targets would be reciprocated by strikes on American targets.
The Americans wouldn’t use nukes, fearing the Chinese would do the same.
But….this is the age of Oreshnik.
It is only a matter of time before Oreshnik type missiles can be fired from submarines .
Imagine a few hitting downtown New York.
Military people understand this as well as anybody. And this is why they always use proxies.
As Berletic points out, it was the Israelis who did the dying in the recent fracas with Iran. It was the Ukrainians who died in the conflict with Russia . More than 1.2 million “irretrievable” losses out of more than 3 million casualties.
No, the US will not go to war with China. Just huff and puff and threaten to blow their house down.
Chappy sleeping (1 AM)
The former feral cat who lived on snakes and lizards and frogs now sleeps beside me every night.
"Revolution can only come from the barrel of a gun" - Mao Zedong
Back in the 70's Russian intelligence believed the US would self-destruct in about 50 years or so - both economically, and civil war or states leaving the union, or both. I don't think they were too far off.
These patterns, like 'psycho-history' in Asimov's 'Foundation' are predictable many decades in advance. Possibly centuries.
To quote from Battlestar Galactica ( 2004-2009), "All of this has happened before and will happen again."
“You, your race, invented murder. Invented killing for sport, greed, envy. It’s man’s one true art form.” – Number Six
"America is not a democracy!" Who cares? And what are the people in the US going to do about it? Who knows?
Unfortunately, due to the massive corruption in the political system in the US, the only way to accomplish any change is a revolution. Unfortunately, and historically, revolutions most often tend to replace one set of sociopaths with another.
As it regards China, anyone who has been following Chinese weapons development over the years hardly needs Brian Berletic to explain the fact that the US doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of defeating China in any type of confrontation. As most analysts have already stated, just the Navy's ships' stores alone would be gone in a week in such a conflict, if they, in fact, survived all of the anti-surface-ship missiles that the Chinese will launch against them...