Worldbuilding Realism Consultation Thread Mk. 4

[Purpelia]

What I do not understand is why you are even thinking about these things in these terms. Russia is NOT going to be invading western Europe. It newer would have, not even during the height of the cold war. And it certainly isn't going to now. There is nothing to gain from doing so. Seriously, what does western Europe have that Putin or any other Russian leader could ever want?

Oil? Natural resources? Russia has plenty of those.
People? Again, plenty of those and far less prone to revolting against an invader at that!
Industry? No luck there either. Industry ain't just people in a big warehouse using lathes any more. Just capturing the factories (those that still aren't in China) would mean little if the workers are all killed or inherently hostile and the infrastructure needed to educate them, feed the factories with resources and stuff and the markets to sell their goods are all in disarray or actively hostile.

So what would be the point beside ideological zeal (which no longer exists) or sheer megalomaniacal world domination madness for there ever to be a WW3 in Europe?

[Kazarogkai]

If were going to be talking about economies then might I ask what is your guys opinion of gift economies? They are few and far between and only seem to occur frequently in isolated locations, and even then only sometimes, but still I find them to be rather interesting to say the least and was wondering if something like it could be possible in a more modern setting if you will. For the most part gift economies are typically confined to tribal peoples.

It's still here.

Have you ever gotten a gift?

Gift economy. The amount of money, things and labour that is exchanged essentially for free between people (parents and children in both directions, significant others, friends) is quite large. Or it would be if we could measure it properly.

But it's a fairly limited form of exchange. We give gifts to people we have ties too in some way. As even relatively small cities are now large enough you can live your whole life in them without even meeting, let alone knowing, everyone who lives there a system which is predicated on personnel ties is not a practical starting point.

That is not exactly what I am speaking of. It's kinda confusing but it is understandable, I'll try to explain as best I can:

From an anthropological standpoint a gift economy much like a market economy is a system for exchanging goods; where it differs is the fact that said gifts are not traded or sold for an immediate reward but instead given without a explicit agreement of immediate or even future award. Custom, tradition, and the like govern how this process works and even what gifts are exchanged.

This in many cases can be a competitive system much like market economies and is usually intimately related to the local political make up of the society in question. An excellent example of this would be the Moka exchange prevalent in parts of Papua new guinea. In the Moka System the gifts in question are pigs whereby reciprocal exchanges are made and upon which social status is achieved. Moka to be specific is the increased increment in the size of the gift. Say you gave me 5 pigs and then after I gave you 6, the extra pig is Moka.

There are more or less two types of people in the system: Big Men and Rubbish Men, to become a Big Man one must give a greater gift than one received. Giving back an equal amount to what was given to you is simply debt repayment and makes you a Rubbish Man, if one wishes to become a Big Man one must give extra to increase prestige and consequently status. One is only bound to repay the debt with Moka being in effect a choice, the choice to become a Big Man or not. By giving more than one receives turns one into a Big Man, by only repaying the debtor even not paying the debt at all pushes one to the other end of the spectrum. A Rubbish Man. As such the gift, both the act of receiving and giving, confers political status granting prestige to the latter and a sense of obligation in the former.

Another thing that makes a gift economy different from a market economy is variety of commodities. A market economy can have a almost infinite variety of both goods and services, so long as there is a supply and demand for it, while a gift economy by it's very nature only has a very limited variety of commodities which are seen as particularly valuable. This being the case arguably a gift economy could coexist alongside a market economy in a given society with the market economy being for "normal commodities" and the gift one being for the distribution of political status and prestige.

[Gallia-]

250 Armatas/year is more than sufficient. That's the same annual output the USA had in the Cold War, actually, so they're basically equivalent.

250 Armatas per year would still lose a fight because of superior Western optronics, guided weapons, and air force.

I love Russian military stuff, really I do, half my nation's military stuff is broadly inspired by it.

But the notion that Russia can win a major offensive war against all its Western neighbors is not a thing.

Oh Russia could conquer Ukraine easily. (But observe that it has not succeeded in even fully pushing Ukraine out of the Donbass)

It might - if there is a catastrophic failure on behalf of Western powers - conquer Estonia.

But there's no existential threat to America or Germany.

Suppose America would be humiliated, somewhat, by the loss of Estonia.

But even that - and that would be pretty bad - is not really a loss of American freedoms. Countries- including the US - have suffered grave, horrible national humiliations far beyond 'oh some tiny allied nation somewhere got overrun' and then continued living on - even very respectably. Russia itself is such an example. You don't need to bat a perfect score to be a respectable, even awesome, country.

Yeah, the mighty USAF with a bunch of F-15s and F-16s whose designs are twice my age. Or like 700 JSFs, most of which would be needed else probably, and maybe a few F-22s. And a tank brigade maybe.

For America to close the tank gap, it would need about 15-20 years to make a new tank, build it, and begin fielding it. Maybe longer. This is roughly Block III's tentative (read: highly optimistic) schedule, which had been in development since 1985, and was projected to have a first equipped battalion with Block III tanks around ~2008. They would be serving alongside the M1A2, which would hopefully have been replaced in service by 2012. That's closer to 30 years than not.

So call it 2040 before the United States can begin to field a challenger to T-14, assuming it pulls its head out of the sand and bothers to do this, with various M1A2 SEP models filling the meantime.

What other technological nightmares straight out the tail end of the Cold War will the Orient unleash before then? In 2030, NATO still trundles around in tanks built 50 years ago, while Russia and China are probably making JSFs and F-22s of similar or better quality to those of the Western air forces due to lack of development and political will in the West.

Once you decide to take a break from pushing the technological envelope for 20 years, and your opponents don't, you start to get into the situation where you may actually be fighting opponents who have technology better than you in the future. This is now the reality you're looking at, unless the West completely reverses direction and begins re-armament instead of pussyfooting around the issue.

Also I'm not talking about Russia annexing Europe up to the Channel or something asinine. I'm talking about the Baltics. Russia would just make Narva another buffer state, like it has with Ukraine, Transnistria, Belarus, North Ossetia, whoever else, to immunize itself to the West. It probably wouldn't even need to fight "all its Western neighbours". Who knows who would show up to defend Estonia? The Baltics and Poland are the two only sure candidates. Germany? Maybe. USA? Maybe. UK? Maybe. It depends on how much armour and how much force commitment these countries have. Looking at historical trends, it will probably be another few years of random liberal interventions to topple dictators and give people democracy from 20,000 feet.

For the record, I don't think that Russia will invade Estonia tomorrow. Obviously it can't now because it would lose, but I don't think that the West will have any real contender to fight T-14 until I'm closer than not to retirement, either. What do you do between 202X and 203X? There's going to be a decade plus where the West is vulnerable to attack by technologically superior or equivalent Russia.

Meanwhile, if the West had just not been lazy after the Cold War, it wouldn't have put itself in this situation in the first place. If the purpose of the military is to defend its citizens, and the budgets are shrinking, the obvious solution is to go for the most high-risk and most technologically advanced solution to replace the more staid and boring things in the military, right?! XM2001 and Block III were both super boring vehicles at heart, with no major development problems or technological hurdles beyond the standard project bloat and growth that is inevitable. A bigger gun, more armour, a new turbine which was built and ready for production, and both being heavier and bigger than their predecessors. A laser ignition system for XM2001, which has been demonstrated on M777 as well. The only thing that was truly radical was XM2001's automatic charge handling, but that was both solved and done by the time the program finished.

Then FCS flies outta "nowhere" (its origins date to the 1970s, though) and the US Army decides it needs to fit Crusader inside a package that can fit inside a C-130 instead of a cargo ship, with protection similar to M2 Bradley: a fantastically more difficult problem. Not only did FCS not meet its goals for weight reduction and armour protection, it was over budget, over time, and the entire point of the program (the digital networking) was half-baked ideas of a military general's wishlist who didn't have the proper advisors to simply tell him what a computer can do.

Then it buys LAVs, despite running wargames in the 1990s that showed that LAV based units would be annihilated in combat against a motor rifle regiment by ICM and tanks, presumably due to lack of armour protection.

It seems that the higher the US military's budget goes, the more willing it is to adopt austere solutions to problems. M1, M2, M270, AH-64, Hellfire, and XM2001 are obvious examples of staid equipment. Perhaps there's an inverse relationship between funding and ability to apply technical solutions to operational problems.

If we consider a general to be a politician in matters of engineering and design of weapons (not the employment of weapons, though, for that is his trade), then consider the US Army to be the US Congress without the ability to assemble advisory panels on things like the Internet, the state of American industry or finance, the tax code, and whatever else the US Congress listens to panels of experts for. It has no experts to talk to, because all the experts are people with a conflict of interest in actually helping the military to reach finality in contract delivery in a timely manner. Why would you give someone what they want when they want, when you can spread a program across multiple countries and districts to ensure it is politically invulnerable while working around a cost-plus contract that rakes in more money? The entire US MIC has a massive moral hazard, it is incentivized to be both inefficient in meeting the needs of the armed forces and savvy enough to do this.

You think America can make a tank with a system that has zero experience in designing a main battle tank? How are you supposed to do that when all the tank manufacturers and engineers are gone? Who is going to control the cost? A fixed price contract can't be used because no one knows has any experience anymore. The US industry hasn't made a main battle tank since the 1980s, and all the engineers involved are retired or dead. Lack of experience on part of the vendors would just mean it ends up being A-12: Tank Edition.

A cost plus contract would mean you end up with Joint Strike Tank that consumes a massive quantity of money, lags behind schedule, delivers less than promised and needed, and exploits the system to achieve maximal profit.

For now, it's a lose-lose proposition to try to make a tank. Industry is very much a "use it or lose it" matter. When you lose it, it takes decades to get it back. There's no real research arm that can tell the military how to spend its money, and the only people who know anything about making tanks are the people who sell them, and they have zero reason to tell the truth about the matter of money, and Congress is loathe to spend any money because the US economy is quite weak at the moment and it needs all the help it can get.

Ironically, the Reagan defense buildup correlated with an increase in GDP growth in the United States, though.

Perhaps war communism really is the solution!

The point is, even losing Estonia would be a humongous blow to NATO members' confidence in the West to protect them. It might even lead to its disintegration, like the EU is facing now, though that might go a bit far. It may just fragment into an Eastern NATO and Western NATO. Regardless, it would shake up the West and make it ask serious questions about itself, and probably further cement its decline. Ultimately, that is what Russia wants. A weak West is in its favour, because a weak West can't try to globalize it or whatever, so why enable this by being lazy on defending Western civilization? Because it won a couple battles? It won those battles because it did the exact opposite of what it's doing: it dug its heels in.

Ultimately the West is probably doomed not from Russia, but from globalization and worldwide capitalism. It allowed opponents, who have an interest in destroying the Western world order, into its community of nations. Russia is resisting, while the Chinese are subverting through theft of technology.

Suppose America would be humiliated, somewhat, by the loss of Estonia.

But even that - and that would be pretty bad - is not really a loss of American freedoms. Countries- including the US - have suffered grave, horrible national humiliations far beyond 'oh some tiny allied nation somewhere got overrun' and then continued living on - even very respectably. Russia itself is such an example. You don't need to bat a perfect score to be a respectable, even awesome, country.

1) It's not really America, it's NATO. NATO is the American Empire, and if goes kaput or fragments with large and rich members leaving, so does the USA's ability to do anything in the world.

2) American freedoms are really irrelevant. The USA won't implode because NATO dissolves, it'll just be incapable of stopping the Chinese or Russians from exporting their illiberal ideologies. Well, mostly China, TBH. Populism is also a real threat to the freedoms that Europeans enjoy as well, which is rather unfortunate considering a German, Dutchman, Belgian, Frenchman, Norwegian, Dane, Swede, or Estonian is just as much deserving of freedom as an American, and all of them are united in the vague sense of the individual freedoms and respect for human dignity that defines the West.

So you have external and internal threats. The external threats would be the easiest to deal with: just increase tank production. This would also address some issues that populists have with the stagnant or declining rates of industrial employment, especially manufacturing, in the West, over the short term. The need for skilled welders and machinists to produce military vehicles in the re-armament program could serve as a subsidy to promote employment, which is literally the only reason the UK bought ASCOD over CV90 (more factory space was needed to make room for the floors for hull production in addition to turret production; BAE just offered to make the hulls in Sweden), and the construction of new factories could pull in additional industrial jobs to employ middle to low education workers as laborers.

Other solutions might to be staunch the outsourcing of company training to universities through legislation. Jobs that used to be apprenticeships, like engineering, accountancy, etc. are being more and more outsourced to university, which puts strain on the lower classes and reduces their social mobility. It's especially evident in America, which has some of the lowest social mobility of all OECD. You can also incentivize companies to offer subsidized trade schooling for low skill workers, to improve their employment prospects.

Low skill jobs like IT help desks or tech support cubicle drone (the modern equivalent of, say, an assembly worker) generally prefer having some manner university degrees in the USA, because it shows that the person is intelligent and can type on a keyboard I guess. Supplement this with vocational schools and a tiered schooling system, that specifically trains people to be like help desk drones or whatever in their final years of mandatory schooling, and you could go a long way to improving the prospects for the inevitable decline of the industrial manufacturing jobs once tank production ceases.

The biggest problems, though, are the wage gaps that Kyiv pointed out in the other thread. Education is becoming both more expensive and more necessary for employment, which is going to fiscally isolate the lower classes who can't afford it. Especially people in adulthood who are independent and unable to quit their jobs. The need for social welfare is rising in low class families that work multiple jobs. US wages have been mostly stagnant since the seventies. Actually, they have decreased since 1973. The federally mandated wages in FY15 dollars in 1981 and 2016 were $8.81/hour and $7.65/hour, respectively. The only people who seem to be getting more money are the ultra-rich. The middle class, mostly composed of managers, engineers, doctors, and what have you, make less and work more hours than they used to due to salary pay being predominant. The lower class, your cubicle drones, food servers, etc. can't really survive in the more economically developed regions of the USA, without multiple jobs and welfare programs anyway.

http://online.wsj.com/media/EPI_product ... sation.png

Ultimately the fault lies with the oil embargo, the Nixon shock, and the resulting destruction that wrought. People know this too, which is why populism is on the rise. It's not the actual solution, but it shows that people are very frustrated and upset with the matter.

It might not make people completely happy, it will especially piss off the ultra rich wealth hoarders who create wealth and use it to promote their own interests over society's interests. The assumption that mere economic growth is a panacea to societal problems appears to have been disproven. Globalization is certainly helpful to people in random third world countries, who can be hired to work in a factory for $1.25/hour and make a large amount of money, but this doesn't help the lower class American make money. If the goal is to really help people, then you should look into how to improve the situation of Western working class, who have been sorta tossed aside for several decades.

The children of working class families are unable to join the information/service economy due to high barriers of education/cost, and those that join the service economy in lower positions are both compensated less and produce less than their parents did. Once you checked the issues that globalization and unregulated financial/banking capitalism has wrought on the Western world, you've started to address the real issues of the working classes, rather than ignoring them.

Hillary Clinton won't do anything of the sort, she is too shrewd (this is an exceptional trait for a President h/e) to do anything more than exploit working class fears for big votes, but neither would Trump for he is a mere tentacle puppet of the Kremlin and a stronger America would make Putin mad. But then, that's not the President's job either. That's Congress's job, and Congress isn't dumb, though it's not really sure how to fix these problems either. Talk is easy, but actually implementing the sort of changes needed would be very difficult and opposed by the ultra-rich.

Honestly though, I doubt the West would implement any change to the current smothering capitalism that is the core cancer which is ripping it apart. The United States is eventually going to turn into a combination of Brazil and Colombia, with massive slum shanties and fortress communities/skyscrapers hiring drug addicts to drive around in old Toyotas to shoot poors or something like that. Europe will rip itself apart with ethnic tensions and collapse into civil wars or something because of its inability to deal with populist issues due to selling out to mega capitalism.

tl;dr Tank factories are excellent job creators so that is sufficient reason to maximize tank production. All forward the United Soviets of America.

[DnalweN acilbupeR]

I'm glad you're keeping the thread running but I don't really see the non-military aspect.. perhaps other than the economical and political factors?

EDIT: For what it's worth, my (rather uninformed) 2 cents are that I'm somewhat skeptical of Russia's ability to fight a protracted war (if it had to) without (at least significant economic/logistical) help from someone like China, most probably. My point is that the resources available to Russia and its infrastructure and economy would probably be worse at supporting a protracted war effort than say, the US, and especially compared to NATO as a whole (even if you'd take into account Russia's allies other than maybe China as I've said).

[HMS Vanguard]

I'm saying that the gap between the USA's technology isn't sufficient to stretch its gap in industry anymore. It was smaller than GSFG in the 1980s, but M1A1 would have wrecked T-72.

What does Russia have that can rival F22 or F35 in even remotely comparable numbers?

Can you briefly describe a scenario in which a US-Russia tank battle would 1. occur 2. be important to the outcome of whatever conflict it occurred during.

[DnalweN acilbupeR]

I'm saying that the gap between the USA's technology isn't sufficient to stretch its gap in industry anymore. It was smaller than GSFG in the 1980s, but M1A1 would have wrecked T-72.

What does Russia have that can rival F22 or F35 in even remotely comparable numbers?

Can you briefly describe a scenario in which a US-Russia tank battle would 1. occur 2. be important to the outcome of whatever conflict it occurred during.

I dislike the F35 not as a concept but the way it turned out with horrible cost overruns and delays (?) . I don't know how capable it is as an aircraft but logically if its weapon and targeting systems are superior to the Russians' and they're at least decently reliable and fly-worthy then stuff like dogfighting performance shouldn't matter at all :because BVR combat:

On a sidenote, MiG-29's and Su-30 or whatever it was called and their newest variants (assuming they're operational in significant numbers) aren't too shabby I think.

EDIT: The biggest problem I would think is that the US would probably make a half-assed effort at defending Eastern Europe and would only get serious about it when countries like Poland or Germany would be at real risk.

[Taihei Tengoku]

The US's problem is that it is a highly regulated/licensed economy, especially in population centers like New York and California, with a rather small welfare state. Getting into work/business is rather hard even compared to Canada or the Nords, and it shows in economic freedom indices. Those that are even more regulated have eternal 10% unemployment and average incomes below Mississippi. What little welfare state there is seems to encourage learned helplessness and entrenchment rather than the migration and job-seeking of previous generations. There is nothing that "build more tanks" will do to solve the general ossification, because every tank is paid for by the productive sector of the economy. Every new Block III death machine is a building unbuilt, materials for medical equipment bought out by GDLS, engineers poached by the MIC, etc etc. Omsk and Ural employed lots of people and Mikoyan was world-class but the doctors were decades behind the curve, everything you could actually buy sucked, and starvation only staved off by Canadian niceness.

The rest of your post is a grab bag of economic fallacies disproven in the nineteenth century.

[DnalweN acilbupeR]

The US's problem is that it is a highly regulated/licensed economy, especially in population centers like New York and California, with a rather small welfare state. Getting into work/business is rather hard even compared to Canada or the Nords, and it shows in economic freedom indices. Those that are even more regulated have eternal 10% unemployment and average incomes below Mississippi. What little welfare state there is seems to encourage learned helplessness and entrenchment rather than the migration and job-seeking of previous generations. There is nothing that "build more tanks" will do to solve the general ossification, because every tank is paid for by the productive sector of the economy. Every new Block III death machine is a building unbuilt, materials for medical equipment bought out by GDLS, engineers poached by the MIC, etc etc. Omsk and Ural employed lots of people and Mikoyan was world-class but the doctors were decades behind the curve, everything you could actually buy sucked, and starvation only staved off by Canadian niceness.

The rest of your post is a grab bag of economic fallacies disproven in the nineteenth century.

are you referring to my post?

[Taihei Tengoku]

The US's problem is that it is a highly regulated/licensed economy, especially in population centers like New York and California, with a rather small welfare state. Getting into work/business is rather hard even compared to Canada or the Nords, and it shows in economic freedom indices. Those that are even more regulated have eternal 10% unemployment and average incomes below Mississippi. What little welfare state there is seems to encourage learned helplessness and entrenchment rather than the migration and job-seeking of previous generations. There is nothing that "build more tanks" will do to solve the general ossification, because every tank is paid for by the productive sector of the economy. Every new Block III death machine is a building unbuilt, materials for medical equipment bought out by GDLS, engineers poached by the MIC, etc etc. Omsk and Ural employed lots of people and Mikoyan was world-class but the doctors were decades behind the curve, everything you could actually buy sucked, and starvation only staved off by Canadian niceness.

The rest of your post is a grab bag of economic fallacies disproven in the nineteenth century.

are you referring to my post?

Kat's

also

The external threats would be the easiest to deal with: just increase tank production.

For the record, I don't think that Russia will invade Estonia tomorrow. Obviously it can't now because it would lose,

now if I was making the best use of (maybe even "economizing") with scarce resources...

[Gallia-]

I'm saying that the gap between the USA's technology isn't sufficient to stretch its gap in industry anymore. It was smaller than GSFG in the 1980s, but M1A1 would have wrecked T-72.

What does Russia have that can rival F22 or F35 in even remotely comparable numbers?

Can you briefly describe a scenario in which a US-Russia tank battle would 1. occur 2. be important to the outcome of whatever conflict it occurred during.

Nothing at the moment, it's just a wall of Su-27s. But then, the USAF is just a wall of F-15s, they're probably about even then with the exception of the handful of F-22s that probably won't make much of a difference. What will it have in 10-20 years until NATO countries can field tanks comparable or better than T-14, assuming it does? Who can know? What will the Chinese have? F-22 and JSF, maybe? The technology gap in aircraft is closing, and the USAF isn't too keen on expanding it. Whatever exists it will still be available in larger numbers, since JSF will be purchased in very few numbers by the USAF and NATO, and F-22 will never grow. There's no telling how many VLO fighters the Russians might field in the end. 50? 500?

Meanwhile the USA is unwilling to put more money towards its defense, Western Europe is lazy and equally decadent, and only Eastern Europe is really recognizing the problem and re-arming.

A scenario is possibly Narva, if Putin or whatever Russian kleptocrat is running the show, decides he needs another buffer against the West. It's a tad far-fetched, Russia probably doesn't have any designs on NATO proper, but if you're arguing this you might as well ask why bother developing any military technology at all, since war is a pretty far-fetched scenario to most people in the West. Why would the West fight a major, potentially years long, war against Russia over Narva?

You'd just drive in, occupy Narva, stop the inevitable NATO counter-attack with your superior tanks and artillery. Threaten to nuke Estonia or something and they'd probably fold and tell NATO to leave. Losing a piece of land is better than fighting a protracted war or getting nuked. What happens to NATO then, since it can't even defend its own members from attack?

~800 T-14s would outnumber the amount of tanks in the Baltics and Poland, including the American M1s. These would be the immediate tanks available. T-14s are better tanks, at least in terms of crew protection, and maybe in armour/mobility and armament too.

It's not like NATO is too keen on developing new weapons lately. European defense contractors are making like 5 missiles between now and the end of history, and the USA is making mostly vaporware. Meanwhile the Russians have T-95lite and the Chinese have Javelins and Netfires.

If NATO had modern land weapons, it would be fine. Perfectly fine. Unfortunately, NATO's land weapons are the best this side of 1978, and Russia has better ones now since that was 50 years ago. Having worse land weapons isn't really a good thing, and it shouldn't be presented as one. Unfortunately, the only remotely modern things NATO is getting is aircraft, and that is still in doubt given that JSF could collapse in the near future if more people decide to withdraw, like the European NATO members.

Anyway, you're looking at a time gap of a few decades before NATO can begin to replace its old equipment anyway, since Europe has skipped replacing anything since the 1990s, and the USA deliberately avoided buying anything new to spend more money on FCS or whatever. If you think it's OK for a country to still be using T-72s or M1s or something when the guy next door has basically T-95, that's fine, but it's incredibly silly. Why should that just be considered fine, when you can start developing a new tank and IFV right now to counter T-14/T-15 and have it in service in the 2030s or something?

It just seems a rather poor judgment to plan for the best case scenario, rather than the worst case one. The West has enough money to easily spend more on defense, so the question is why isn't it? Its opponents are using 5-10x greater proportions of their economies on producing weapons. NATO sits on its hands and does nothing.

Oh, I forgot the entire Western MIC is incapable of making things without gaming the contracts to maximize profit and minimize effort.

The rest of your post is a grab bag of economic fallacies disproven in the nineteenth century.

Economics should really just be rolled into philosophy departments tbh.

now if I was making the best use of (maybe even "economizing") with scarce resources...

You'd lose the next war?

Because that's what happening in the West.

[Taihei Tengoku]

The last factor in the West's defeat in the next war is the make and model of its weaponry.

[Gallia-]

Who needs EXPENSIVE and BLOATED F-35 when you can have CHEAP and SIMPLE F-8 Crusader?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/653 ... 811462.png

The only thing that might save the West is that the air forces are actually pursuing modern weaponry.

At least until those modern weapons are matched by the Orient, anyway. The land forces have already been surpassed or near equaled.

[DnalweN acilbupeR]

Let's get back to police/fire/ems

[HMS Vanguard]

What does Russia have that can rival F22 or F35 in even remotely comparable numbers?

Can you briefly describe a scenario in which a US-Russia tank battle would 1. occur 2. be important to the outcome of whatever conflict it occurred during.

Nothing at the moment

Then I would say the claim that US technology isn't compensating for any gap in producing cruder weapons is wrong.

[Taihei Tengoku]

Wars are extensions of politics, politics is the extension of people. The West's biggest advantage has been its superior social organization (perhaps social technology, even). Complex weapons are paid for by forgoing real goods in the productive sectors of society. Once that rots no amount of philosopher kings and Second Offsets will save the West.

If you'd like to read the Soviet Union series of articles (they take a couple of hours), you'd find the terminal rot had set in the USSR in the 70s, at the nadir of the US military and well before M1. Military spending didn't respond to the Reagan Rearmament. By the mid-80s the Soviets weren't even trying yet the West was unaware. Now, F-35 is barely operational yet the Chinese are slowly adjusting their GDP projections downwards and Russian rentier economics are on the ropes.

[Gallia-]

Nothing at the moment

Then I would say the claim that US technology isn't compensating for any gap in producing cruder weapons is wrong.

I would say this is correct, although the USA has given up on F-22, much to the dismay of everyone except Putin.

I would also say that every attempt to make advanced land weapons that the Army has tried was either abandoned for a far riskier and less grounded-in-reality plan, or turned out to be vaporware. Advanced ships and aircraft, yes, these were made. The land weapons they support? Not so much. The US Army and USMC are terminally incompetent.

The entire post Cold War procurement system might as well have been an exercise in how to lose future wars and waste billions of dollars on nothing. The proportion of the economy used to produce advanced weapons is shrinking as well. This isn't necessarily bad, fewer weapons are needed since Russia is smaller than it used to be, but it did lead directly to said vaporware, because part of that portion was the US Army's internal research & development apparatus. Once that disappeared in 1992, the programs that were sensible were replaced by the nonsensical.

So far, the only successful acquisitions in the post-Cold War era so far is Virginia, and a variety of precision guided missiles and bombs. The rest all date from the Cold War, or are bungled in multiple ways, or dead like F-22 and Zumwalt. It is very unfortunate, because it seems Russia and China are acquiring more (relative to their current ones) advanced weapons with rather substantial ease compared to the United States.

Wars are extensions of politics, politics is the extension of people. The West's biggest advantage has been its superior social organization (perhaps social technology, even). Complex weapons are paid for by forgoing real goods in the productive sectors of society. Once that rots no amount of philosopher kings and Second Offsets will save the West.

If you'd like to read the Soviet Union series of articles (they take a couple of hours), you'd find the terminal rot had set in the USSR in the 70s, at the nadir of the US military and well before M1. Military spending didn't respond to the Reagan Rearmament. By the mid-80s the Soviets weren't even trying yet the West was unaware. Now, F-35 is barely operational yet the Chinese are slowly adjusting their GDP projections downwards and Russian rentier economics are on the ropes.

Why you assume the USA having an additional tank factory and a couple closed arsenals reopened to expand its R&D is going to somehow turn America into the Soviet Union is a current mystery. The real problem being fixed is the US Army's inability to acquire modern weapons because they're ignorant of what modern technology is. BRAC mostly destroyed the Army's ability to do R&D by outsourcing or selling off major research laboratories like the Army Materials Laboratory. These were important. They helped it make sensible decisions in translating generals' wishlists into feasible operational requirements.

The arsenal system was one of the things keeping the US Army from going full FCS and vaporwaring the entire Cold War. Without it, what are you going to do? Make insane requirements for things like OICW and NETFIRES because you don't understand how guns work?

If the laboratories hadn't been dramatically shrunk and consolidated, a lot of the dumb shit that cost billions of dollars would have been contained inside the arsenals. OICW would just be a weird gun that the Army made, like XM235. FCS would have been panned after Watertown figured out they couldn't make a protective ceramic sufficient to defend against 14.5mm at the weight they wanted (although CAV-ATD was something like this, it wasn't built by the Army because the US Army couldn't build things anymore). I don't think Army Research Laboratories has saved $18bn over 10 years or whatever it cost to produce FCS's PDFs.

[Welskerland]

Is it a good idea to ban political parties and transition Welskerland into a government without political parties?

It seems like a good idea, but I'm sure the majority of RL modern nations have parties for a reason.

[Gallia-]

Is it a good idea to ban political parties and transition Welskerland into a government without political parties?

It seems like a good idea, but I'm sure the majority of RL modern nations have parties for a reason.

Political parties exist because people share similar ideas, prefer to associate with people who share their views, and humans are social animals. If you ban political parties, they will just organize under a different name, or informally, unless you ban liberal democracy/political association altogether or something. Then you've become an illiberal democracy like Russia or Singapore.

[Welskerland]

Is it a good idea to ban political parties and transition Welskerland into a government without political parties?

It seems like a good idea, but I'm sure the majority of RL modern nations have parties for a reason.

Political parties exist because people share similar ideas, prefer to associate with people who share their views, and humans are social animals. If you ban political parties, they will just organize under a different name, or informally, unless you ban liberal democracy altogether or something. Then you've become an illiberal democracy like Russia.

So, if I want a democratic society, then I'm better off with political parties?

[The Akasha Colony]

Political parties exist because people share similar ideas, prefer to associate with people who share their views, and humans are social animals. If you ban political parties, they will just organize under a different name, or informally, unless you ban liberal democracy altogether or something. Then you've become an illiberal democracy like Russia.

So, if I want a democratic society, then I'm better off with political parties?

More like if you have a democratic society, you will have political parties no matter what you try to do.

They might not call themselves political parties if you ban them, but they will exist, because political parties are just collections of reasonably like-minded people working together for mutual benefit and the accomplishment of an agenda, and that will happen no matter what.

[Gallia-]

Political parties exist because people share similar ideas, prefer to associate with people who share their views, and humans are social animals. If you ban political parties, they will just organize under a different name, or informally, unless you ban liberal democracy altogether or something. Then you've become an illiberal democracy like Russia.

So, if I want a democratic society, then I'm better off with political parties?

Political association is inherent to liberal democracy. You can have a democratic society which does not have effective opposition political parties, or parties that are stooges of the ruling party. Both Singapore and Russia do this. This would be illiberal democracy, however, so it depends on whether you believe liberalism is a positive aspect of a society.

[The Technocratic Syndicalists]

snip

> Implying russia will ever make more than a handful of T-14s

>Implying that the overwhelming majority of russian equipment isn't vintage cold-war (T-72, mig-29, etc) and objectively inferior to comparable America hardware (M1A2, F-15/16, etc)

>Implying that the majority of russian navy ships and submarines aren't defective and/or rusting away in shipyards

>Believing moscow propaganda that russia will "mass produce" the PAK FA

>Implying that Russian aircraft engines don't have extremely short MTBFs and aren't 20-30 years behind american engines

>Implying domestically made russian avionics aren't at least two-three decades behind their US and europe analogues

Remember what happened to the Russians the last time they tried to match US military spending? Oh I don't know, maybe the whole government and economy collapsed. Just a minor setback, you know? The American military and military-industrial complex has it's flaws, but stating that the Russian military is equal or superior the American military in any way, shape, or form is just flat out denying reality. The 1950's called, they want their "missile gap" and "bomber gap" back.

[Gallia-]

snip

hey look it's america

[Allanea]

The idea that Rosstat, or anyone else, can predict GDP growth rates in 2098 is nothing short of laughable.

[Allanea]

>Implying that the overwhelming majority of russian equipment isn't vintage cold-war (T-72, mig-29, etc) and objectively inferior to comparable America hardware (M1A2, F-15/16, etc)

So, in fact not true? 80% of Russian military requipment was replaced, is being replaced, or will be replaced by new things by 2020.

>Implying that the majority of russian navy ships and submarines aren't defective and/or rusting away in shipyards

This isn't 1995. Most Ruissian Navy ships are in service.

>Believing moscow propaganda that russia will "mass produce" the PAK FA

Define mass-production.

>Implying domestically made russian avionics aren't at least two-three decades behind their US and europe analogues

Current gap has closed to 8 years in major details.