What we support and defend

[Dayuhan]

Or it is a good reason to name the first chapter of a history of some possible future, hopefully never fought, war "How we lost before it started."

You're right. Why, I hadn't thought of that. We do what you suggest and just give up supplying various islands by air until the Red Chinese cry uncle. Or better yet, we move Guam about a thousand miles to the east and after the Red Chinese say "I give", we can move it back again. They'll never expect that.

Have you forgotten, or do you choose to ignore, the place that deterrence has in this calculation? The point is not to prepare to counter any possible move a hypothetical antagonist might make, that is the way to insanity and bankruptcy. You have to ensure that the hypothetical antagonist has more to lose than to gain from starting anything.

Or you can bias yourself in the other direction, and be certain that if the time ever came, we weren't prepared.

Do you propose to prepare for every conceivable eventuality, no matter how improbable? That's going to be quite a task, given the budgetary realities involved.

How many times do I have to explain that I am not talking about today, I am talking about 6-8-10 years in the future. I expect there will be a few more by then.

There would have to be a whole lot more, and a fairly rarefied chain of events that would offer numerous opportunities for preemption and intervention, for what you fear to come to pass.

You go right ahead and believe the crafty powers that be on our side actually know a lot about what the Red Chinese are up to. I stopped believing completely they know much about anything right after I finished reading "Blind into Baghdad."

Of course there's a lot we don't know, though of course as well most of what we do know isn't going to be revealed. there's also a lot they don't know. They don't know, for example, how we might respond to a whole range of eventualities. They can't possibly know, because we don't even know. Strategic ambiguity is a useful thing.

Oh, okay. Well can't do much about that. Mach numbers are mach numbers and height capability is what it is.

The article previously referenced made the point that the performance of individual aircraft is only one part of what makes something effective: we don't do WW2-style dogfights any more.

Go back and read all that I've written on this thread and the South China Sea one for an answer. I'm not going to do your homework for you.

I have seen nothing there about what we might do. I've seen a few references to things we might say, which looked to me unlikely to achieve any positive outcome. Saying isn't doing. In any event, making bold declarations about what we will or won't tolerate is not going to change any particular balance of force, except for the worse: belligerent talk on our side is likely to lead them to spend more faster, and it won't give us the capacity or the will to do the same.