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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2084 thread views

Transnational Thursday for February 22, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Yes, this has been the case for quite awhile. For all the hand-wringing about the U.S. spending more on defense than the "entire world combined", a simple PPP adjustment already gets us to the point where China is spending as much as the U.S.

America's nominal GDP is 15x that of Russia. We should be able to easily overwhelm their military production. But we can't. Because our military spending is fake and mostly wasted on salaries for useless mouths.

To be fair large chunks of spending by Russia and China is also fake. Mainly because of corruption. China particularly has huge amounts of their spending just vanish. Which is they are always going on anti-corruption drives, appointing a new anti-corruption czar..and then discovering said tzar is themselves corrupt, firing and replacing them.

If you've never been in China for any length of time it is difficult to understand just how corrupt it is. The only place I have spent any amount of time that was worse was Pakistan. Though the Chinese version is slightly better hidden.

How many of those Chinese ships and missiles and electronics are built with sub-standard parts so someone could skim? How many missiles do they think they have vs how many they actually have that are functional?

"We now have new revelations of corruption in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army resulting in, among other things, “missiles filled with water instead of fuel” and missile silos “with lids that don’t function.” According to U.S. officials, this latest bout of corruption “led to an erosion of confidence in the [PLA’s] overall capabilities” and made President Xi Jinping “less likely to contemplate major military action.” Xi responded by purging at least a dozen PLA leaders implicated in the scandal."

I broadly agree but

missiles filled with water instead of fuel

My understanding is that this is a mistranslation. This means that there is corruption in the missile service and that missiles might lack fuel or have insufficient fuel, not that missiles are literally filled with water.

Still very bad of course but not as pants on head retarded as literally filling missiles with water.

This is a very good point and I think we'll just have to wait until there is a kinetic conflict to see what happens.

Russia is clearly getting more bang for their buck than the U.S. is. They just don't have a lot of bucks.

When it comes to China, they will soon have quite a large material and spending (PPP adjusted) advantage over the U.S. On the other hand, nobody has any idea what will happen if China ever tries to actually do anything. I have a feeling it won't go well for them. They have no actual war-fighting experience. If they truly want to invade Taiwan, they should start fighting some minor conflicts to gain experience. The logistical difficulty of taking Taiwan with a hostile U.S. fleet against them is off the charts.

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