Shrike
2hr ago
Right.
IMHO, the US Navy could conduct a devastating far blockade of China relatively easily. (That's something that is missed in discussions of superior Chinese shipbuilding: "The PLAN said that the US Navy was seizing all of their cargo vessels and I asked him what he was doing about it and he said he just kept building more ships and I told him it kinda sounded like he was feeding the US free cargo ships and Xi Jinping started crying.")
The main question is if that's actually something that is fast enough to help Taiwan. If they prioritize air and sea denial strategies, their survival becomes more likely.
Shrike
3hr ago
Hypothetically, the US could do a lot to increase its military pressure on China re: Taiwan without taking away from Ukraine support at all. Maybe we could try that first?
Sure. What do you have in mind?
Sure, we lit a lot of money and attention on fire
Money and attention counts on my bogging-down meter, at least half-credit. Regardless, this is a semantic discussion: the point is that for China, more US investment in Ukraine is (generally) better, regardless of what that looks like. Obviously there's a sort of "looping back around to being bad" outcome where the US nukes Russia, or switches all its rare earth supply chains to Ukrainian sources, or what have you.
Shrike
3hr ago
I don't really think this is true. A lot of it depends on the specific goal the US is trying to achieve. But just generally, the US doesn't need carriers to "win" a Taiwan Strait engagement.
Frankly I'm not sure the US would bother to use a lot of Tomahawks on missile launchers, particularly since the newer ones have an antiship mode.
Shrike
3hr ago
Empirical evidence suggests strongly that it keeps not happening
Look, there's a difference between something not happening and something being impossible. I'm discussing how China would react in a hypothetical.
Furthermore, the Taiwanese themselves (unlike the Ukrainians) are pretty lackluster in their own efforts to build up deterrence to China.
Yes.
Don't confuse stocks and flows.
Sure. Both are important, and which is "more" important depends a lot on your timeline.
They aren't being permanently committed or destroyed.
The munitions, vehicles and weapons we sent there are. I agree that we aren't "bogged down" the way one might describe us as being "bogged down" in Afghanistan, but we are "bogged down" in the sense that it remains a large center of US governmental attention (which is not unlimited) and, for as long as we continue to support the war effort, US industrial capacity (which is also far from unlimited).
Shrike
5hr ago
This is not an actual available option.
Why not?
If we have munitions capacity issues what better way to fix them.
Sure, if Ukraine/Europe can release funding to fund US munitions (which I do gather is happening, and that seems fine). But if the US has budget X and they can split it between the Pacific and Europe, or just spend it on the Pacific, the latter option is scarier for China.
What on earth does "bogged down" mean here? I'm not arguing we conduct military operations.
That ship has already sailed. The US has been conducting "non-kinetic" military operations in support of Ukraine's war effort for the duration of the war.
Shrike
5hr ago
Taiwan is a naval battle first; I don't think we've been supplying much naval weaponry to Ukraine.
I agree with this on the whole, but we have given Ukraine a fair amount of Patriot missiles, which would be very helpful defending against Chinese ballistic/cruise missiles, particularly for point defense around airfields.
Shrike
5hr ago
The US/West failing to sufficiently back Ukraine emboldens China and other would-be aggressors when they do their risk calculations.
The US ditching Ukraine to prioritize Taiwan I think would actually spook China. The US doubling down on its commitments to Ukraine means fewer weapons in the Pacific, unless the US also slashes its social services or something else to double down on walking and chewing gum. China would prefer the US bogged down in Ukraine, and the US openly abandoning them to their fate to focus on the Pacific would demonstrate that the US "ambiguous" policy towards Taiwan is actually one of total strategic commitment to Chinese containment.
There's no new cheap missile to take them down
There is actually, the APKWS laser-guided rocket, which has already been used by US fighters to take down Geran-type weapons.
A single F-15 can carry fifty of these, [edit: sorry, at least 42, although I'm sure larger pods could be introduced] introducing video game ammo logic to real life and allowing a squadron on station can defend a vast territory from even hundreds of Gerans pretty easily and more effectively than static air defenses (Gerans are slow and ~easy to detect if they are flying at 3km). At somewhere around $20 grand it trades nicely in cost with a $70,000 cruise missile.
Ukraine can't use this particularly effectively because it has been unable to degrade Russian air defenses and fighter coverage (and in fact I wonder if Russia modified their Gerans to fly at higher altitudes specifically to deny fighter interceptors ground clutter cover). NATO's air forces and capability to degrade air defenses are vastly superior to Ukraine's, so the APKWS is a more viable defense strategy for them.
Shrike
4d ago
Religion as whole in the US is still declining
There have been some signs that the decline is tapering off. I would not be shocked if it continued to slide, but I also would not be shocked if it didn't go lower.
Of course part of this is the question of "what counts as religious"? The rise of the nones, for instance, hasn't really corresponded with the rise of secular atheist types (and many nones indulge in religious practices) - so has the decline of religion been essentially false, and it's just been that organized religion is on the decline? Or do we really need to look at practice and church attendance? That seems like a more serious and better measurement in many ways (as I understand it it actually is a better predictor for many religious benefits) but does that unfairly discount religious practices that are by their very nature disorganized? There's some methodological questions there. I'd simply confine myself to observing that the "decline of religion" mostly doesn't mean "the rise of secular liberal atheism" or anything like that. It means people aren't going to church, not that they have become transhumanist Star Trek liberals or something.
They are also massively less influential than they were in the 80s and 00s and they'd have to work pretty hard to get that power back.
One notable difference since the 00s, I think, is that evangelicals will be more comfortable being in a political coalition with Catholics, and even Mormons and Muslims. They're still going to have serious reservations, but Obama-era liberalism made the misstep of putting "conservative religious people" broadly on the same team in some areas. I think this is tremendously important - all the little parts of these coalitions have their own organizations and patronage networks. Exercising political power is not just about counting heads, you need networking and institutions, and "all religious groups in the US that are relatively conservative" is much more powerful a coalition than "evangelicals."
Shrike
4d ago
That said, I suspect this is mainly due to the much larger population of non-practicing Catholics?
Yes, I think this is right. I also think there are a lot of people in the Catholic church who are very left-wing (...even on positions like abortion) and who want to reform the church from within.
Whereas as you say evangelicals who are dissatisfied with, say, the evangelical teachings on abortion just leave.
That said I would not be surprised if this changes - if younger people who leave Catholicism increasingly drop the label entirely, rather than continue to call themselves Catholic and just not do anything, then Catholicism will become more meaningful as a signal.
I think this is likely. My guess is that in the US over the next 40 - 50 years, Catholic numbers drop considerably (or if they hold steady, it's due to immigration) but the remnants are more dedicated and more "conservative" as far as such things go.
Shrike
5d ago
I am spitballing here but I have definitely wondered if places with longstanding minority groups just are able to handle integration much better than places where the very same groups are new. In other words, in this scenario, possibly you are both right and it's just that DFW, which has ~always had a significant Hispanic presence compared to Fairfax, Virginia, is much better culturally at handling the situation.
It would be odd if it were not at least somewhat that way, imho.
Shrike
5d ago
I don't think that this is true – non-denominational churches (which I would think are often but not always right-wing evangelical coded) are actually growing. And attending evangelical types typically have a positive tfr, IIRC.
Some groups (like the Southern Baptists, IIRC) are undergoing narrowing (perhaps temporary as Baby Boomers and the Silent Gen decline?) and of course retention rates are not perfect (so a high tfr does not guarantee continued adherence.) But I think that modeling a mild downturn in attendance to infinity is as naive as modeling a mild upswing to infinity.
Regardless, just going by current trendlines, I think we can expect evangelicals to continue to be a "live player" group. They're often overlooked in favor of the Amish or tradcaths because the Amish are basically a far-group to most internet users and tradcaths have a lot of momentum, so they are more fun to talk about, while evangelicals' day in the sun ended with Bush 2, but evangelicals never actually went anywhere.
I wouldn't necessarily predict it but I think there is actually a very good chance that evangelicalism (defined broadly, and perhaps throwing in a few Protestant denominations that wouldn't consider themselves evangelical but nevertheless have many of the same characteristics) is actually the Religion of the Future in America. Very plausible to see them cannibalizing the mainstream denominations as they enter tailspins, pick up tradpilled younger Gen Zs, and make massive inroads into traditional Catholic territories.
Shrike
5d ago
It is reasonable to assume that, if things continue on as they have for another 100 years, secularism will continue to rise.
If things continue on as they have for another 100 years (appropriate to your analogy) the "mature" civilizations will, like the elders of a community, only be a shell of their former selves, if anything is left of them at all.
Shrike
5d ago
There is potentially a discussion to be had about how Catholics got into that position, and I'd guess it has to do with the quite large and influential Catholic education system.
I would also just add that "evangelical" continues to be much more of a signal for "right-wing" than "Catholic" and so I think Catholics are an easy place for righties to get people who agree with them on most everything without also having a religious affiliation that is listed under I AGREE WITH RIGHTIES ON MOST EVERYTHING in the dictionary. (Obviously evangelicals are more nuanced than that, but in terms of public optics I do think it matters a bit.)
As per your comment, I would not be surprised if this actually changes, and Catholicism becomes smaller but much more visibly right-wing as older generations of leaders die out (and as the left shifts to be more and more hostile to religion and away from old Catholic-friendly patronage networks). I foresee Catholic thought-leadership staffed with evangelical foot-soldiers as being a very potent coalition in the future, despite their cracks.
Shrike
13d ago
Even if you have outer layer air defenses, you don't have a lot of time if they goof up and you need your CIWS. So maneuvering to unmask seems very plausible to me.
I'd also say that the US military, from what I can tell, embraces a mindset of utilizing the full spectrum of their capabilities for the sake of professionalism. Which is a DoD Powerpoint-y way of saying that the military likes to both test and practice things during real military environments, so making a radical maneuver to unmask in the face of even a nominal threat could very well be seen as a "best practices" thing.
Shrike
13d ago
Likewise, if I imagine a general being killed by Russian ballistic missiles, in most cases the body will not be in a state where you can put him in his quarters and pretend it was a natural death.
If you're killed by overpressure I think the body is often pretty intact, isn't it? Which would be pretty plausible for a situation where someone gets hit in a bunker.
Shrike
13d ago
Note my reply here – a decoy without the electronics systems would be pretty useful nonetheless (and that's without getting into using it as an aerodynamic test item or a testbed for new electronics systems, both of which are potentially very useful applications).
to avoid having to explain that under certain conditions (extreme low range, high powered analog radars) your stealth plane isn't that stealthy
This isn't all that secret, I had a B-2 engineer tell me something similar to my face in casual conversation.
Shrike
13d ago
You might recall during the last high profile stealth bombing strike operation about two weeks ago that some of our stealth bomber fleet was used as decoys for the rest of our stealth bomber fleet. If you had a flying decoy that looked good enough to fool peer adversaries you could fly it around, park it on the ramp in Diego Garcia, etc. etc. to fool enemies about our real movements and make it less likely that they actually hit valuable military hardware during an attack.
Shrike
14d ago
2008: USAF fake the crash of Spirit of Kansas using a (probably remote control) flyable prototype mocked up. B-2 inventory is officially -1.
Why would you crash a perfectly flyable prototype when you could use it (as a decoy, if nothing else)? Strong "fake the moon landing on the moon" vibes.
Shrike
14d ago
It would be hard to cover up an actual hit of a carrier (carriers have thousands of people onboard). If that had happened I would expect it to have come out via RUMINT already. Not saying it's impossible, just that it's much harder than covering up e.g. an American Marine getting whacked by Russian Iskanders.
While we're discussing the (possibly) hit B-2 it's worth mentioning the second F-117 that was hit by the Serbians and "covered up" (not acknowledged) by the USAF.
Edit to add – the Spirit of Missouri is still active. Wikipedia has a picture of it overflying an airshow in 2018. If it was hit, then it was repaired, or an extremely convoluted plot as suggested by the Serbians was put into place to cover it up (frankly it would have been much easier just to say that it crashed due to pilot error back in 1999, I don't understand why one would wait for nearly a decade to finish the coverup).
Shrike
22d ago
I'm not sure I actually believe this – the right runs a lot of parallel institutions that are better/More Elite than the state-run institutions. I think the actual problem for the right is a bit more subtle.
Some of it is that is because of how school systems work in the USA, local ideology often matters more than state or federal ideology – and since population centers are often leftie, figuring out ways to redistribute resources away from local school systems to the institutions (elite and otherwise) that are more right-sympathetic is a victory for the right. Uncharitably, you could argue this is school choice does (although the counter-argument it only works because, frankly, the generic-and-often-left-wing choices are often quite bad and many people would take their kids to right-wing parallel institutions if they could afford it).
Shrike
25d ago
One of the interesting things that the right wing in the USA is doing is working to destroy many of the institutions that can be deployed to be The Man (the Department of Education being perhaps the prime example).
I don't think this eliminates the chance that the right-wing counterculture suffers from victory (as seems to typically be the case!) but I do think, if successful, it makes it more difficult for the right to seize and hold the low ground of "mandatory and cringe" that typically alienates people. Banking on "diversity of thought" to skew right-wing is a bold choice that may not pay off, but if it does it is actually likely to help keep the right more diverse (and more tolerant) by ensuring that the right's "client base" (for lack of a better term) is diversified.
Sure. None of these, frankly, seem all that far-fetched.
Look, China can do math. All the "resolve" in the world doesn't do us any good without missiles in the warehouse.
If we are confident nuclear madman theory alone is sufficient to deter China, we don't need to do any of the above. But I don't actually think anyone wants to die in nuclear fire for Kiev or Taipei and as such the threat of a nuclear madman is unlikely to be persuasive and, even if persuasive, unlikely to be consistent in a democratic society (note the difference in Russian foreign policy towards Ukraine after the election of President Biden!) So one concern with the nuclear madman threat is that it will simply result in waiting out the madman. (Another concern is that two can play that game, of course!)
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