Turkey is changing its political and military alliances, moving out of NATO into a potential Iran-China axis. Chinese war planes (pic Sukhoy heavy bomber) were photographed in Central Anatolia and they apparently came directly from China refueling in Iran. While America is still fighting in Afganistan, the overall impression is that Asia is being evacuated by the West.
17 comments:
In the end, you can't stay where you are not wanted. 50 years, 100 years, eventually you'll get sick of running an occupation against the will of the locals and leave. The US will leave those places where it's no longer wanted, as it left the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, etc.. There are other places (Japan, Korea, Kuwait) where it is very much wanted as a counterweight and nuclear umbrella and now more than ever as the Chinese show themselves to be ham handed and not subtle in their diplomacy.
The Arab mistake in dealing w. Israel to this day is to assume that the Jews are like Crusaders and Americans and will get sick of holding on against opposition and go "back home". There is no other home for the Jews, probably no place that would take them even if they wanted to, so no amount of harassment will change the Jews mind and cause them to leave en masse.
K
We can take much mmoe than they can. We will outlast all of them.
The Chinese airforce is not competitive w. the USAF at present (probably not even w. Israeli AF). They fly designs based on stolen Russian IP, in consequence of which the Russians will no longer furnish them w. aircraft. Instead they buy leftovers from various ex-soviet republics and reverse engineer them, which must put them 20 yrs. behind. It's one thing to reverse engineer a cell phone , another to reverse engineer a military aircraft. Nor are their pilots experienced in combat, etc. Flying 2 plans to the Mediterranean is a stunt, not a serious military threat. Maybe in 10 years but not yet.
K
The Chinese airforce is not competitive w. the USAF
Nor Japanese, Russian, and Indian airforce.
Turkey sits in the middle between the West and the East. Slowly it is facing East, and that is worrying.
Demography is destiny - the religious Islamic hinterlands have been outreproducing the Europeanized cities. This goes on for 2 or 3 generations and you don't have the same country anymore - the people you had before have been replaced by a different group. If u think this is shocking in Turkey, just wait until it happens to some European country.
K
The planes look very impressive until you realise that they are only as good as the system they are integrated into. The Israelis knocked out all the Syrian MIGs that were sent out in Lebanon in 1982. The Iraqi airforce was a no-show in 1991 and 2003 against the US. There is no doubt in my mind that for the next 20 years the USAF can knock out the Chinese if they ever come up for dogfights.
Yes, thank God the Chinese have no expertise in advanced electronics.
Seriously, I think 20 years is too long - in 10 years the Chinese will be competitive. The other problem is this - any US government program costs 30x as much as the Chinese spend on the equivalent. The Chinese dig subways for $30 million / mile, the US spends $1 billion +. I'm sure the same prevails in defense spending. Even though Chinese military budget is much smaller than the US, if they have a 30 to 1 price ratio, their budget will stretch much farther. The US now orders its most advanced aircraft in tiny numbers because each one costs a bloody fortune. One of the reasons the Germans lost WWII despite having the superior military hardware (everyone seems to agree that the German stuff was better) was that the US was then the leading volume manufacturer and was able to outproduce the Germans by a large ratio.
K
Albert Speer didn't give the order for mobilization for total war until after Stalingrad. The Germans had the ability to produce enough equipment in the early years of the war, but they weren't properly mobilized until the war was effectively lost.
The Germans also were within range of US bombers, which was not reciprocally true.
Also,German war production relied substantially on coercive labor practices, unlike America. I have yet to see the definitive work on which method ensures the highest productivity.
All things considered, I think Germany would have won a more restricted war, but the weakness of fascistic psychopaths everywhere is they try to fight too many people simultaneously; ie they genuinely believe their own ubermensch propaganda.
Parallels in the modern world, anyone?
Anon.
Anon.
The guy I've been reading, Prof Tooze, disagrees about the German stuff being better and about the Germans not being fully mobilized early on. He's a rebel I guess. His book has a good rep though.
Germany was rather primitive at the time. 1/3 or 1/4 of the people were still peasant smallholders. I believe America was more advanced, so that's one factor in its superior production (besides sheer size and population). Tooze says that we think of Germany as industrially fantastic nowadays but it was behind Britain at the time.
He also emphasizes the difficulty of running industry in the Western conquered states, without British coal and sufficient food. French coal consumption went down 50% by the end, and steel production went right with it. Hence he considers the attack on the USSR to have been rational. There was no hope of defeating America with undersupplied French and Dutch factories. Germany's starting the war he paints as having been rather insane, since winning would have required rather remarkable luck in both France and USSR. The Western command chose rather poorly in 1940 and that was quite a piece of luck. Hitler didn't approve the fake-right-go-left strategem until rather late. And it was the oldest trick in the book, indeed it must be far more ancient than literacy itself. The Westerners must have been pretty nervous and flighty to have fallen for it. It does seem that Hitler believed his own propaganda. He had the same views about American decadence as a present-day Wahabbi, but the latter is substantially more correct than he was. And he of course thought that the Bolshies were extremely unpopular in USSR. Maybe they were, I don't know, but they were also very ruthless. Why he thought he would beat France/etc and the Brit expeditionaries in the Western continent, I have no idea, but he certainly did beat them.
Hitler (and his generals) understood that the French were stuck in 19th century tactics and had no response prepared for an armored mobile blitzkreig supported by air power. Once the Maginot Line was bypassed it was game over. Lt was one thing for the German armies to sweep a couple of hundred miles across France to the Channel - sweeping thru the vast frozen distances of the Soviet Union was something else.
There's no doubt that Germany did not have quite the industrial capacity needed to win the war (thank God) but the quality of their engineers was unsurpassed. I'm not sure that either the US or Russia would have had a space program were it not for the captured German scientists and designs, or it least it would have been delayed perhaps a decade. Ironically the Scuds which threaten Israel to this day are direct Russian copies of the V-2. Hitler would be pleased.
K
Few had any answers for the German bitzkrieg tactics. Brave Polish cavalrymen led useless charges, the so called cowardly French actually suffered 100,000 dead in just 3 weeks of fighting. This was compounded by erratic orders from the top in the face of a rout. In retrospect it seems that the only to have fought the Germans was to have struck Germany first. But the statesmen of Europe, Chamberlain and Petain wanted to spare their generation another war leaving millions of their contemporaries dead. The Nazis had no such compunction. Even Stalin did not want a war that early on. The Russians properly fought back only at the gates of Moscow when the Germans were stretched. After that German blitzkrieg had no more force in the face of Zhukov's concentric rings and the bitter hatred of the Soviets. But to properly do this the manuevours have to take place over hundreds of miles, territory that the French did not have. Only the Russians could do this and even they took two years. The inhumanity of the Nazis convinced the British that they had to go all out with the bomber offensive (one third of the U-boats were destroyed in the docks.) As the Adam Tooze book that Rob refers to makes clear, the war became a war of which system of total production could outlast the other. In general only the Germans had wanted war and their destruction was fitting punishment. In Tooze's book Albert Speer emerges as a sinister organizational genius, responsible for Germany holding out for an extra one to two years, the years in which the Holocaust was at full stretch. Just imagine how many Jews, Soviets, Poles yes even Germans would have survived had German war production not been at the level it was. Death was too good for the likes of industrial warriors Speer and von Braun.
Speer at least served a long prison term. von Braun was treated as a hero of the American space program even though it later became clear that he was complicit in the maltreatment of (mostly Jewish) slave laborer at Peenemunde who produced the rockets. Lucky for him he died before he was exposed as a war criminal. The American government wanted his services and conspired to cover up his crimes. Shameful.
K
It is hard to even know which and how many German engineers were helping the Soviet space/ military effort.
Anon.
Neither the Soviet nor the American space programs would have progressed as rapidly as they did without the captured Germans.
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