Posted by baud147258 5 hours ago
I don't know how one would reach that conclusion, least of all a Major at the nation's leading military educational institute. Nothing "hell-bent" about it.
9/11 was a huge success for Bin Laden's goal of restarting a forever war, though.
And between WW1 and WW2. And just before WW1, during the Belle Époque. And probably before that, too.
The US is weirdly attached to violence and war in ways you only tend to find in modern dictatorships or the empires of old.
> It's the nation born of a continent-wide campaign of genocide and plunder
Hard to see how that description doesn't apply to most of the New World. Mexico and Peru were founded on bones of conquered and plundered empires. First Nations in Canada suffered much the same as their counterparts in the US.
> It's the only Western nation that couldn't give up slavery without a civil war.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to say this is literally false, but the implication that every other nation gave up slavery willingly and without violence certainly is (see Haiti, for a particularly bloody example)
Edit: I will go a bit further..
I consider Military the greatest power on Earth. It's sacred, necessary. But those who abuse its power commit, in my view, the greatest of sins. I don't mean the soldiers who fight, but those making the decisions of who they fight. The soldiers do their job, often willingly. And they are the ones who face the consequences. To betray them by corruption is the ultimate betrayal. War is a power that, I think, should be reserved for situations with no other option. Mercenaries not considered.
Pogroms; slavery; totalitarian dictatorship; theocracy; intentional mass starvation; mass organ harvesting; mass forced relocation; anarchy; failing to respond to unprovoked violence; restricting freedom instead of defeating the adversary.
You really think the massive amounts of death and destruction aren’t top ten? What do you think happens to the local population when an invading force arrives? You should go and read about the rape of Nanking. And just read about what happened in wars before the modern era.
Yes, Pearl Harbor was a known vulnerability, prior to the Japanese attack. The US just wasn't ready to take airpower seriously, at that point.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k5okm8/why_d...
We're living in times where an evangelical POTUS dislikes the pope, oligarchs talk about the "antichrist", wars are started with reference to "armageddon" [1] to distract from old money power brokers such as Epstein who has esotheric Kaballah symbols on his office walls [2 @14min42sec].
The authoritarians are concluding the democratic experiment because they can't hide their heritage any longer. All hail the King.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/troops-being-told-to-prepare-...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/never-seen-video-shows-eps...
Depends how the war starts. Russia? USA somehow attacks? Easily 6 months of buildup in Europe.
China? Again USA somehow attacks? Again buildup in Australia, Japan, Korea.
Also US air power is absolutely supreme. I don’t see how they will be fighting in actually contested skies even only 2 months in.
Stationary bases can easily be targeted globally. The United States has 11 nuclear powered aircraft carriers. We can assume any peer adversary will have knowledge of their approximate whereabouts at all times. It's unclear how they would fare in next generation conflict but we can assume USA's enemies are designing their weapons around taking those carriers down.
The Air Force is currently upgrading many of its aircraft for longer range operations to increase standoff range
All of that was assumed to be true. The US would do small police actions here and there with highly-specialized forces. The rules-based system would more-or-less do the rest.
In the meantime we gutted not only the logistics but the manufacturing base needed to feed that system so that we could "cut costs"... which didn't really happen anyways.
We should be throwing people in prison over this.
The US has been foremost among western democracies in backing dictatorships, even genocidal ones.