Democrats

[bralbovsky]

To answer the Assad question, worst mistake of Obama's administration, not behaving like a superpower.

Guy gasses his people, again.
Finally have pretty solid evidence that he did it.

Without more than an hour warning, but with an hour warning, that we are going to respond, we cruise missile every airfield control tower in the country. Every single one.
1 These are military targets, if there's a civilian one, it doesn't have to go in this round.
2 This is purposely to remove the huge airpower/terror advantage that the regime has
3 Because we can, we're a superpower.
4 Ya, there's likely collateral damage, hopefully small, but the whole operation happens in one night. No protracted bs, no messing around.
5 It comes with a demand for a statement that asserts that Assad will never do it again. He has a week.
6 Week goes by with no statement, during which we assess how thorough our job was and return to the UN with a suggestion that this statement is really critical.
7 No statement, return to wherever we missed. Also we miss, and several missiles are misdirected at the presidential palace.
That last one is really a message to Putin.
8 Yes, Statement, then game over, we get the rest of the chemicals out and wait for him to panic again before we return to 7

Sadly, this ship has sailed.
Nevertheless, if you are going to be the cop of the world, you behave like you want the job.
You minimize civilian trauma
You focus on targets that cripple the bad guys
You don't mess around.

This isn't nice, nor existentially good. It's just a rational response to a guy breaking a very important protocol, unless you want guys breaking important protocols all the time.
PS. I sent this to Defense Department at the time, no response.

[bralbovsky]

So can do we do now?
First we have to get Putin's dick out of our mouth. Nothing useful happens until that first step.

Next, we fund a think tank in Turkey for Syrian ex-pats to figure out what needs to be done on the ground.
We get everyone to lay off the Kurds.
We push what's left of ISIL into Syria, and that's where we send them when we exile them.
We assist in blockading the place. Not saying nothing in, nothing out, but there needs to be a critical selection of what/who goes in or out.
Until he learns to play well with others, he gets time out.

We establish, in the UN, and I know it's a huge challenge, the idea that there is a classification of a failed state.
North Korea, because of hunger makes the list regularly
Syria,
lots of other places could get put on notice that they're about to go into receivership, which means no longer guaranteed sanctity of borders, etc.
We can have a whole thread about the details if you like, but it's really time we defined what it means to be a functioning country, with generous metrics, but with metrics.

[Bonefish]

It'd be a good topic, I think.

[mimekiller]

Being right about everything all the time...is it exhausting? kind of.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4 ... ssion=true

[Bonefish]

[bralbovsky]

There are approximately 25 air control towers in Syria.
They are fixed on the geography, assuming that the light show requested by 45 is all we wanted to spend,as well as a 20% failure rate, that's about 4 missiles per building.

They don't have to be dust.

You don't throw things out of spite or just for show.

Fear isn't the point. Fear doesn't make strength, it just makes enemies.

The point is being willing to show reach when it's important.
The problem is not air superiority, or the lack of it.
The problem is losing sight of which struggles are important.
Selective cynicism is even more toxic than the pure kind.
I'd suggest at its core, that's Biden's problem too.

Response from friend who teaches at war college in PA: "Totally do-able, we just didn't do it."

He also advises that D Dept doesn't respond to unsolicited suggestions. as a policy. He notes, "Neither does Disney."

[Bonefish]

Two military strikes planned by career military officers, who it's reasonable to assume are competent at their job(if they're not, then we have greater problems than 45), required more assets to be used in a concentrated strike of questionable effectiveness, but your idea is to use a fraction of that power to make a more widespread attack against defended targets. Yeah man, totally passes the smell test.

[mimekiller]

I guess I will never understand the disconnect, its not like we dont know what happens when the USA swings its dick around in countries like this, its 100 percent bad.

[Bonefish]

We're risk adverse. Americans coming home in black bags makes us sad and means we lack the will to do what it takes to win these sort of conflicts. We also don't have a dictatorship(yet), so the Chief executive actually has to get congressional approval on major military operations. We've also had two decades of people selling this "surgical strike" baloney alongside the "World's Only Superpower" jank, topped off with a healthy amount of American Exceptionalism that leads us to believe we're just inherently better than other people. We've generally speaking, got a congress that doesn't know how to budget it's military: we've set a tight budget for every service, but we won't let those same services close down un needed bases or facilities(because that would hurt the economy of congress critter's districts, which leads them to orce us to maintain more infrastructure than we need), which means they have to make cuts in either readiness and training or in research and development, and I think we can all figure out who has a bigger lobbyist budget: force readiness or Defense Industry. This is going to bite us in the ass i we don't fix it.

Technology is a funny thing. In general, people look at technology in a very incremental fashion, in that you get Tech1, then Tech 2, then Tech 4, then Tech5, and each tech is a direct improvement. In truth, you can often leapfrog over technological improvements: while Syria hasn't incrementally improved their technological capability, there have been substantial improvements in fielding emergent technologies, particularly drones. Smaller organizations tend to be more agile for a variety of reasons, and this means they can often start using technologies without the bureaucratic slow-down of larger organizations. In addition, many of the newer technologies that are out there? They don't require large start-ups. Producing a main battle tank, advanced aircraft or naval vessel requires a lot of infrastructure in a great variety of different fields. For example, the Russians are, to the best of my knowledge, still lagging behind in optics technology, and prior to their invasion of Crimea were reliant on french imports for a number of targeting systems for their armored vehicles. Meanwhile, drones, digital signal processing, computing? These are all technologies with lower entry barriers, and they're more "bolt-on" than "purpose-built": you can give a platoon of insurgents quad-copters, and they'll start using them almost immediately, but if you gave them, say, a sophisticated radar installation or main battle tank, they'd require years of training and establishing infrastructure to be able to use it operationally.

There's also the problem that we've allowed several capabilities to either languish or completely evaporate. A focus on fighting technologically backwards hill people for the past two decades has lead to an assumption that we will always have a massive technological advantage, which is compounded when people assume that high tech high end solutions will "trickle down" to low-end needs. For example, the idea that since an F35 is a multi-role fighter that has amazing amounts of technical capabilities, those capabilities will automatically allow it to perform less technically demanding tasks with ease. One of the biggest examples of that is the retirement of the A-10. While I completely understand the Air Force's argument("We can't afford to keep everything, so we're going to keep the stuff that can perform the most diverse set of missions"), the end result is that the A-10 has capabilities that the F-35 simply cannot match, in terms of loiter time, survivability against low-altitude threats, and, payload. These are critical for the Close Air Support role, and the F-35 simply will not, on it's own, be capable of filling those shoes. But, the sequestration requirements mean that the AF has to put something on the chopping block, and the A-10 is what they want to 86. But congress says NO.

Additionally, the problem of balancing commitments to other regions. Yes, the United States could take out every single airbase in Syria, but it would require a commitment of about 80-120,000 personnel, which would require us to pull troops from other regions, or reduce the training times for other troops. Theoretically we've got a national defense doctrine that specifies that we should be able to fight three "Major Regional Conflicts", which are basically wars the size of Iraq and Afghanistan, simultaneously. However, we've never hit the force readiness requirements for that. China and Russia have both been studying how we wage war, and explicitly developing different technologies AND doctrines to that end, as well as pursuing global politics in a way that play into their grand strategy. For instance, the support of countries like Iran, North Korea, and Syria: any of these three offers the potential for an MRC to occur, and if the US is stuck fighting two MRCs at once, that's the opportune time for China or Russia to flex their muscle. Essentially, they want to misbehave at the same time that we're engaged somewhere else, so we don't have a free-hand to act against them.

Finally, there is the sneaking little problem that we have a disconnect between the consequences of our military adventures verses the risks. We tend to brush off collateral damage as inconsequential, and fail to understand why foreign people arn't particularly pro-american: why would the average middle eastern Muslim support us? We've generally blown up more of their shit than anybody else over the last thirty years, and we're not consistent. At the end of the day, America will train you, arm you, then send you off to die against superior forces and stop supporting you as soon as it's no longer militarily expedient. This tends to result in a great deal of cynicism and mistrust of American intentions.

[Bonefish]

the tl;dr is: lol, they're brown people, and we only care about brown people if they have oil or we can gain something by using them.

[mimekiller]

I know this thread is not just turned into a foreign policy topic.


the CIA probably did the tanker attack(s), right? i feel totally crazy typing that but like come the fuck on

[Bonefish]

I don't generally give the CIA that much credit.

[mimekiller]

I mean my number 2 candidate is some kind of Israeli plot but who knows

AND Beto can for sure go fuck himself, what a dumb ass idea.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/24/politics ... index.html

[mimekiller]

A PARTY OF ABSOLUTE COWARDS LMAO TRUMP 2020!!!!

https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/201 ... -dead.html

[Phoebe]

They should have sent the damn police after them like they had planned to, and let the world see what crazy white militia nationalists do, and then trumpeted their damn cap-and-trade bill as the ultimate form of capitalism and pro free market action. WTF Republicans are only anti-socialism when the resource is LABOR; they're absolute pure communist-anarchists when it comes to every other form of natural resource.

[Mike]

[mimekiller]

well yea I'm not calling them cowards because they are submitting to a equal or superior foe, but a minority that failure to meet head on shows a basic lack of ability to accomplish anything. Its the classic Simpsons joke about dems "We hate ourselves and can't Govern"

[Phoebe]

Can the same be said of Senate Republicans at this point? That they are not "ALL irrational extremists"? I would prefer to think not all, but they ALL unanimously voted down border funding today because it is WAY more important to them to do it their way than to do something right. Plus three Democrats who joined them - I guess three is the magical amount of Democrats for moral cowardice to reign supreme.

[Mike]

[Phoebe]

I don't understand why they had all this brinksmanship over a bill if they never thought they could have passed it. Surely they had the votes at one point, no? Maybe if I actually looked it up and read about it I would know. Pfft.

Mime has a point, because it seems like Democrats can't get together firmly behind even the things that poll with majority support. Nevertheless, over the past two decades, nationally, they've had exactly two years to get everything done. It's not much in comparison. So the blame really lies with the people who vote, and don't vote, in this country. 18 years of the worst b*******, and we're the ones to blame because we can't get anyone better in charge.