"BEIJING (Reuters) - Amid the roar of tanks rolling through a residential street in central Beijing at midday, 31-year-old Li Meiping cried tears of joy.
“So handsome, so handsome … we love you, Beijing loves you,” she said, holding both thumbs up to soldiers as they waved to the crowd from behind long black guns anchored to each tank."
Probably making those soldiers pretty uncomfortable.
Check out these drones though.
Meh, we’ve been doing fully autonomous (no remote pilot) carrier operations and refueling since at least 2013. They have a model.
Has been the case in USSR. People were so proud, so proud
Cold War 2.0 here we come…
But but but global warming, stolen childhood dreams
I nearly cried tears of joy when I saw President Trump’s motorcade roll by, right in front of me.
Yes they do, also worth looking into THAAD and AEGIS.
Well, I mean, if both sides went at it the only thing that could be proven is that realistically speaking both sides would lose.
I *think* that if you destroy a nuclear missile they typically do not trigger the warhead. Most of them are built so they only activate at the last minute and at one point I understood this better and am hazy on it now, but there’s a piece of uranium that has to lock into place. If the missile is destroyed in flight it should be inert material (minus its standard radiation) that falls. Although everyone designs somewhat differently and things don’t always work in practice so who knows. I just get the impression it would all not be good.
Generally, following this stuff it seems the US is typically several decades ahead on tech although there are specific areas like mid range missiles where China is competitive that are key to their strategy. The CN missiles are actually why those drones above were pushed into an automated aerial refueling role, to allow US carriers to operate outside the range of CN anti-carrier missiles while still flying air to ground sorties, so its a constant move, counter-move. CN’s main advantage are scale and given the lack of force projection, any conflict would realistically be in CN, which also gives them home field advantage and allows them to focus heavily on land based missile tech. Anyhow, its all sort of a non-point I can’t imagine a scenario where either party willingly got into a serious conflict with the other. Don’t see how anyone benefits from that.
The drones are for aerial refuelling, they would be refuelling F35’s based on the strategy that they’re using. Supposedly it gets them to sufficient range.
RE cyber etc, that’s my point about specific areas where CN is up to speed. Things like aircraft, carriers, etc, they lag significantly, but certain areas they’ve built a strategy around they are competitive.
I don’t think the US could stop CN from taking Taiwan, I think it just comes down to CN deciding if its worth it or not economically, etc. If they’re really set on Taiwan then it becomes a matter of when not if. It’s definitely a potential flash point. I don’t think the JP, SK, Taiwan allegiance is strong enough to really respond to CN in unison, the cost is just too high for each country individually, although I also think CN has little practical interest in taking on JP or SK because in reality that would just be so costly and its not like they’ve run out of ways to expand organically.
Regarding your first statement, no, that’s not how nukes work.
Regarding your second, have fun with this website. It’s seriously addicting. https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Not with that attitude.
We could easily stop them. Nuke a few metro areas and see how willing China is to continue. Sure, we’d never do that. But we could and there really wouldn’t be anything they could do about it.
That’s obviously hyperbole, but I was reading a CNN article this morning about how we likely couldn’t beat Iran in a war. Um, what? In any of these scenarios, it comes down to how willing we are to kill civilians. We could destroy any country on earth even without nukes. Just comes down to a perception problem. We’d probably lose a few allies in the process if we went around committing mass genocide.
But we could.
I’m pretty confident no missiles are reaching America. Now if some guy sneaks in with a dirty bomb, sure, that could (and, honestly, probably will at some point) happen. But, no, we can shoot those down without too much trouble.
No, STL has it right on this one. This isn’t a check the box type thing. US has had theirs operational for going on two decades now with refinements and one of the many benefits of things like the F35 are that ours is integrated in ways nobody else’s is. They’ve been doing tests where the F35 detects stuff on its suite and then feeds the data back to AEGIS systems ewhich then fire completely based on that targeting data and take down the targets. We have an integrated network like no other. Which is also why your comment about the F35 vs drones earlier was sort of off, it’s a very 4th generation way of viewing military tech. The US through its investment in force projection, overall tech and geographic isolation has major advantages that countries like China lack. We literally have bases and launch zones worldwide, including Thaad and AEGIS batteries at allies that allow us to feed data from launch onwards and a network of nuclear subs. Even the Russians have been pretty openly upset about the asymmetry our network creates.
Anyhow, it’s a pointless debate, but in those types of scenarios the US has major advantages, in more old school 4th gen conflicts, China is well positioned to defend itself (although not really strike back).
I don’t want to start a thread on this - but, why in the actual mother fuck have we not stepped up to go bitch slap the hell out of China and make them GTFO of Hong Kong?
^Because Trump views HK as a bargaining chip. Also, the West overall just doesn’t have the will to get involved other than saying some occasional stern words. It’s really sad actually that one of the most economically vibrant and free places on the planet is about to get consumed…
I don’t get why the US would be involved tbh. This is not a US problem, the always goes around talking about how we shouldn’t be playing world police but a few protests start and people want to commit trillions and pile up causalities endlessly. It goes without saying we have a tendency to always make these things worse, but like clockwork, we always assume this time is different.
I mean, its sad, lots of things are sad, I think sharks eating seals is sad, but Americans live in a big world that they don’t own and they need to learnt accept that.
Would you think that if seals were ugly?
What about sharks eating elephant seals?