What we support and defend

[carl]

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.

Not at all. In fact that is what drives my opinion. Two of the things that make for a believable deterrent are having the tools and having the other guy believe that you will indeed use them if needed. Of course you can't counter any possible move, but to suggest that you should if fallacious. It is sort of a straw man and the fallacy of the false alternative rolled into one, counter everything or counter nothing. At least that is the way I am seeing you present it.

Your last sentence sort of implicitly contradicts that though because you say the antagonist must lose more than gained if there is a tussle. In order to do that you must make some decisions about what is most likely to happen and counter that. But some decisions must be made because you can't counter everything. If you try, you counter nothing and the antagonist sees that, hence, no deterrent.

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.

Obviously not. To suggest otherwise is to set up a straw man to be knocked down at your convenience.

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.

That is your opinion. Mine differs. But at least you are talking about the future too.

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.

Strategic ambiguity is a useful thing to a point. We left things ambiguous in Korea and Kuwait and things didn't work out so well. It is best to leave them pretty sure if they cross a line something will probably happen and there should be a clear line. Ambiguous maybe in how many of brick will fall on their heads but no doubt that they will fall.

I would bet that the chances of them knowing what is happening in the upper level of our gov and what the actual true mood of our people is, is a whole lot greater than our knowing that about them, the result of a relatively free vs a totalitarian state.

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.

They didn't so many WWII style dogfights in WWII. Most kills were lethal passes and were made against victims that never saw what killed them. Performance mattered. It matters as much as ever. The SR-71 is the classic example of that. All the fighters and SAMs that tried to get it ended up just watching it go by. The article referenced also seemed pretty darn sure that the Red Chinese will never do the other stuff. Being cocksure that the other guy can't, is unwise. Like the man said, "Well, don't you bet your life on it." (from the same movie as before.)

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.

Look harder. Bold declarations and belligerent declarations are part of the escalation of force continuam (sic). You don't go straight from passive inaction to wild violence. You work up to that. What you call belligerent talk I call warnings, especially when backed up by preparation.

You act as if they have no agency. Almost as if they are insects that just react to stimuli. I don't think that is true. They get scared just like everybody else.

I apologize for my crack about moving Guam 1000 miles east. I should have been more gentlemanly. My point was that even if we choose to fight as best we can where we have the greatest advantage, their are preexisting positions and things we have to defend. If we don't defend those positions, however difficult that is, we may end up losing anyway.