We tried isolationism and then the Barbary Pirates tried to steal our lunch money. Hence the US Navy and everyone going “well that was to be expected because...humans”.

I think Assad will settle for surviving and whatever oil is in areas he currently has remaining control over. At most they’ll push to make sure the pieces left are contiguous and can support one another.

Lol, like Bush gifted Clinton with dropping Marines in Somalia?

The estimate for annual cost of 1 US soldier in Afghanistan in 2012 is a $815K but $300K of that is fuel and the craptastic infrastructure (Iraq was much cheaper) and the need to ship everything.

Yah, but in this case it probably doesn’t matter. Eventually even the ISIS folk will shoot at the Russians.

Time to slip the FSA some more Stingers and watch some Froggies take a dirt nap.

An anti-ship missile with a 1000nm range sounds great...assuming that you don’t care what you sink at the end of that 1000 miles, that you can adequately detect and localize the target to fire on and your c2 network is up to the task of coordinating that strike.

That assumes that you can actually locate and target from that huge range.

1) Most of the articles on FA about how stupid and wasteful the Pentagon here is click bait and wrong.

There are a lot of low threat areas where folks still want terminal BMD defense. The older Burkes not getting Baseline 9 will go there.

“Is pretty much the answer, we have become so comfortable with having air superiority since we started using aircraft we don’t think of anything else. We never really put much thought into SAM systems and at best always throw something out that at best works as a mild stop gap”

China needs carriers because without them they have no counter against a far blockade besides subs and subs can’t stop aircraft or land based ASMs. If we control Malacca, Sunda, Lombok, etc China loses access to oil. We can play A2AD as well.

China is currently still in soft power mode with some passive aggressive positioning in the SCS sprinkled in there.

“Yes, it is a little bewildering to think that the Navy is just starting to come to terms with this issue, and the fact that most of the Navy’s ballistic missile defense capable surface combatants can’t look for air breathing and ballistic missile threats at the same time is a well known problem.“

Lol...Obama fucked him hard. A Democratic President allowed Congress to essentially exempt fracking from environmental laws (pissing off all the greens) and also managed to get the Saudis to continue to push oil prices down “in competition” with the US by maintaining production. Even though it’s messing with their own…

This guy fired the head of the guard for being too hardcore. I’m fairly certain that if they let him he’d disband the guards as a symbol for peace.

Sorry your empire is bust but if nothing else the British Empire showed the Chinese that might makes right and it was only a hundred years ago or so that lesson was retaught to a weak China.

So far the territory they want is territory they lost. Some of it is marginally questionable like how far south in the SCS their traditional Imperial territory really stretched. Tibet is also iffy.

There’s no real reason to agree to protocols you’re just going to blow off right away.

Folks here don’t know history so are hell bent on repeating it.