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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30730 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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I would expect that if push came to shove, India would sacrifice its relationship with Russia (already a white albatross apart from the cheap oil, since all the military equipment they sold us is now looking extremely suspect), if they had an opportunity to really kick China in the balls with the assurance of US support.

Second, there's a significant amount of anti-US sentiment in India, often portraying the '03 Iraq war as just as bad, or even far worse than what's going on in Ukraine.

Such sentiment is not common among the people that matter, in the upper echelon of the government, who still have an inferiority complex that is greatly pleased by validation from the States.

To see that phenomenon in action, albeit not at the state level, look at the popularity of the genre of YouTube videos that involve a random white person praising any aspect of India.

It's refused to join any agreement to help defend Taiwan and instead looks only to counter Chinese influence within its own subcontinent.

Does this matter when there's a reasonable expectation that in the case of a shooting war, the Indian navy would turn the Strait of Malacca into a graveyard for any vessel that had red in its flag?

China certainly fears opportunistic attacks, even if India itself doesn't particularly care about Taiwan (and we ought to care more, if only for the sake of the supply of semiconductors).

It's kind of bizarre that a nation with the third largest GDP (by PPP) has minimalistic international aims, but it might be just something about the Indian character

We have no real reason to beef with our neighbors with the notable and glaring exception of Pakistan and China, both nuclear powers. That takes a lot of the oxygen out of the air when it comes to an appetite for other interventions, since there's always the chance that the former clown will attempt to take advantage of it. Pakistan at this point is a shambling zombie mostly motivated by a desire to stick it to India.

I'm sure that in an alternate universe where the US shared a land border with hostile great powers like Russia and China, expeditionary sentiments would be dampened by a need to conserve force where it counts.

since all the military equipment they sold us is now looking extremely suspect

Only to propagandised idiots of the 'everything Russia bad school of t hought'.

Nobody with even a small amount of sense who's been paying attention to Ukraine was is saying Russia is losing due to 'bad equipment'.

I don't think "everything Russia bad". Ukraine itself uses a lot of Soviet equipment, the same as Russia does.

What I'm getting at is that getting locked in to the Russian equipment is a bad idea for the same reason that you don't just buy a weapons platform, you also need to buy support, both logistical and technical. Russian equipment seems significantly worse than Western equivalents when it comes to complicated electronics and avionics, and it's a dead-end platform as the West shoots further ahead.

You can see how poorly the AK-12, T-14 and Su-57 do compared to their western counterparts, if Russia had enough confidence in the latter two to field them.

West is superior in radards and avionics, however, that's a very small % of overall military equipment.

Overall the western MIC doesn't seem to be in a good shape. It produces very little, and given the levels of dysfunction in its leadership I doubt it can learn from the war and develop useful things needed for a future war. E.g. they're still building aircraft carriers despite it being fairly obvious carriers won't survive modern missiles, whether hypersonic cruise or guide ballistic.

It's really quite something that e.g. in Ukraine, Russia apparently has better recon and more drone capabilities than the west, somehow.

In fact, I’m sure that in an alternate universe where Brazil was aligned against the US and willing to put money behind that position, we would not have been invading random middle eastern countries or expanding NATO(if it existed in the first place). The US owns the hemisphere, after all.

Does this matter when there's a reasonable expectation that in the case of a shooting war, the Indian navy would turn the Strait of Malacca into a graveyard for any vessel that had red in its flag?

But we... have... red... in our flag...?

I implore the US Navy not to staff its ships with citizens of Chinese descent in that case. We might shoot them just for fun.

Well, if you want the Strait of Malacca to be de facto occupied, anyway.

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