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Message: [QUOTE="Teufel, post: 525562, member: 182"] You sound like a French General lauding the effectiveness of the Maginot line in 1939. China and Russia have been shaping their doctrine and military forces to indirectly contest the American way of war. No one is going to go toe to toe with a Carrier Battle Group, but I don’t know how well we would fare against a fleet of small boats that are bristling with over the horizon anti-ship ballistic cruise missiles. China is clearly the bigger threat. They are our biggest trading partner and almost everyone of our government, military, and civilian supply chains are linked in some way to China. We just found out that China may be implanting circuit boards with malware at their factories. Who knows how widespread that is and what information they have stolen with those microchip implants. If the reports are true of course. [URL="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies"]Bloomberg - Are you a robot?[/URL] They are also using their economic power to buy influence around the world and rebalance the global political system in their favor. This has already happened in South East Asia and is occurring in Europe, Africa, and South America. They can easily pull the economic and diplomatic levers of their national power to increase their global influence and gradually, or suddenly, reduce our own. China is also feverishly researching artificial intelligence, machine learning, and quantum computing. The first nation that develops those capabilities will dominate the next generation of military technology. Right now they are rapidly outpacing us as their entire industry supports their objectives, while our innovators thumb their noses at the military on “moral grounds” and jump in bed with the Chinese. A quantum computer will quickly neutralize the most sophisticated encryption and I’m afraid that all of our critical infrasructure and information systems will be laid bare if we aren’t the first to the finish line. Our critical infrastructure, of course, is already notoriously undefended. The United States has always enjoyed the protection of two vast oceans to keep our enemies at arms length. The internet, however, will permit our adversaries to quickly invade our information networks and bring any war directly to the home front. How will we fare if one of our adversaries destroys our financial sector with a SOF raid, missile strike, or a cyberattack? China and Russia both know that they will lose if they go face to face with us in a global confrontation. They will do their best to ensure that any conflicts stay below the threshold of declared war. I don’t think we fare well in that kind of power competition. You say that the Russians will run scared from our BCTs and Carrier Battle Groups. What will we do if they do not, and threaten to deploy tactical nukes if we don’t back away? I’m really not sure what we would do in a scenario like that. No one is trying to destroy America. They are trying to become regional hegemons, and this normally means they will have to erode American power before they can do so. [/QUOTE]

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