Generational Dynamics World View News

[Navigator]

** 01-Jul-2021 World View: Intelligence in armed forces

So when Navigator claims that the today's young soldiers aren't very
intelligent, I'm inclined to agree with him. Even if they are
intelligent in terms of iq, they're still extremely stupid in not
being able to make even simple logical deductions, let along how to
respond to a battlefield situation or how to operate a high-tech
weapon.

But it's even worse than that. Soldiers who join the armed forces
should spend every waking hour developing the skills necessary to
fight a war. But now we're learning that after learning nothing in
college, they're going to spend their time in the army being lectured
about white privilege. So it appears that the soldiers in the armed
forces are going to be as stupid as AOC.

I believe that this was the point that Navigator was making.

Our Soldiers are a reflection of society as a whole. As Xeraphim pointed out they are on the higher end of the scale.

The point I was trying to make is that the intelligence of our top military leadership is questionable. The HEAD of Planning and Operations at the Pentagon (LTG James Mingus) has a BA in music from Winona State University. No graduate degree other than Army War College (which is a joke). The position he holds is a critical one and one that requires serious intelligence. I admit that I do not have first hand knowledge of him, but I have not known many stellar thinkers who went to third rate colleges and got Music degrees.

France in 1940 collapsed not as a result of having bad Soldiers. The French are not "surrender monkey's". They have a proud military tradition and fight well as individuals. The defense of Fort Vaux in WW1 is a stellar example. What sank France in WW2 were Generals Gamelin and Georges. Two people in critical positions at the very top of the French Army who utterly failed when the big test (actual war) came. Their plans were unbelievably conventional, they did not react to a rapidly changing situation. They had also saddled their organization with obsolete tactics and poor organization of their substantial resources (The French and British in 1940 had more tanks on the Western Front than the Germans did, and of roughly comparable quality). [we will later see comments from others about the Germans having radios in their tanks while the French didn't, but the French could have, just chose not to]

Based on my personal experience at the Pentagon, with multi starred generals and with Secretaries of the Army and the crowd around them, we have people of similar caliber as Gamelin/Georges (or worse) currently leading our Armed Forces. There are some exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions.

[Navigator]

On a much happier note - the Supreme Court just upheld Arizona's ban on ballet harvesting and out of precinct voting, and struck down California's law requiring non-profits to disclose the identities of their donors. The democrats are apoplectic, and there are already calls to abolish the filibuster and pack the court. Curiously, these stories lead Fox news, but barely merit a mention on CNN and MSNBC.

If we are lucky, history may give Trump and McConnell credit for saving the republic through their persistence in getting honest Supreme Court judges appointed, despite an onslaught of democrat lies and threats.

I am no big fan of Trump (though his administration was far more competent that what is now in place), yet I heartily applauded his Supreme Court appointments. In this area, he did stellar service (aided by McConnell in getting the last appointment through). If only Reagan and the Bushes had been able to appoint such people.

The democrats may seem like they are ascendant, but they will wish they had lost the 2020 election when the economic crisis and then the war come to pass. These events and their incompetence at dealing with either will sink them.

[John]

** 02-Jul-2021 World View: Length of World War III

I want to add to this discussion by commenting on how long the world
war will last. There have been several suggestions that the war will
end fairly quickly.

That's not a reasonable expectation. A good rule of thumb is that a
generational crisis war lasts at least four or five years, from the
point where the Regeneracy occurs (Pearl Harbor) to the final climax
and surrender (VJ Day).

When a population goes through a generational crisis war, it goes
through a process that takes several years.

At the beginning, the population is highly nationalistic, even
euphoric, expecting a quick victory, as happened in recent past
non-crisis wars.

However, the illusion, the unshaken conviction of certain victory,
turns into shock when things start going wrong. In the words of
historian Carl von Clausewitz, writing in the 1830s, "The effect of
[defeat] outside the army -- on the people and on the government -- is
a sudden collapse of the most anxious expectations, and a complete
crushing of self-confidence. This leaves a vacuum that is filled by a
corrosively expanding fear, which completes the paralysis. It is as if
the electric charge of the main battle had sparked a shock to the
whole nervous system of one of the contestants."

This triggers panic and depression in the entire popuation. If we
imagine an entire population going through the same five stages of
depression as an individual -- denial, depression, anger, bargaining,
readjustment -- the process that the population goes through takes at
least 4-5 years.

In the case of the approaching war, let's just focus on Asia.

China will be fighting a war with the West, but additionally there
will be a civil war between north and south, and between the Uighurs
and Tibetans vs the Han. There will be a war between Chinese and
Russians, as Chinese pour into Russia's Far East, and head toward
Vladivostik, which the Chinese claim must be returned to them just
like Hong Kong. And China will also be fighting a war of revenge with
Japan.

The Hindus and the Muslims will re-fight their 1949 war. In Central
Asia, Uzbeks will be re-fighting wars with the Tajiks and the
Kyrgyzes, with the epicenter in the restive Fergana Valley (or
Ferghana Valley). In the Mideast, there will be many scores to be
settled between Arabs and Jews, Sunnis and Shias, and among various
ethnic groups.

I could go on to Africa, the Caucasus, and Europe. And let's not
forget famine and disease.

So a new world war would not be over quickly. And since some of these
local conflicts could get a late start, the world war may go on for as
long as ten years. At that time, there will be a new international
conference setting new international boundaries, there will be a new
United Nations 2.0 and a new European Union 2.0 and a new African
Union 2.0.

[Cool Breeze]

Great analysis, and highly possible.

If it does come to that scenario, and indeed takes that long, the man of abomination will likely appear to "end all wars" eternally - or so he will promise. This would perfectly coincide with plans of a one world digital currency and government, and I also believe that transhumanism will be on the march to fully bastardize God's creation.

[Xeraphim1]

** 01-Jul-2021 World View: Intelligence in armed forces

Navigator and Xeraphim1 --

I've been following your discussion and would like to connect the dots
to an unrelated news story.

So when I say that I want to connect the dots between this news story
and your discussion of the military, I particularly want to quote one
paragraph from the above referenced news story:

> "Many people in/around the intelligence apparatus have
> noted and confirmed to me that most of the modern human resources,
> within the working analytical part of the intelligence apparatus,
> are immature, solitary and emotionally stunted individuals.
> Accepting things as they directly appear, this subtle snark is
> actual confirmation."

This corresponds to my observation that most young people today are
idiots, even college graduates. AOC is the poster child, and her
followers are even stupider than she is. SAT scores have been falling
for decades, and many young people today are baffled by a simple
fourth grade math problem.

So this relates to the level of intelligence in today's armed forces.
If you're talking about IQ, then yes, the people are undoubtely
intelligent.

But if they've graduated from college majoring in "international
relations," and got out of college as stupid as AOC, then IQ has
little value.

I really wonder if AOC is as dumb as she portrays herself or whether it's an act. She did get a great paying job out of it so I wouldn't be surprised.

Being a successful soldier requires a great deal of knowledge and
skill, and requires many years of intense study and education. But if
all they know is women's studies and sociology, then they're idiots.

The majority of people in the military are enlisted who rarely have college degrees. There undoubtedly are officers with underwater basket weaving degrees, but I'll suggest they are much in the minority for the simple reason that people who get those degrees are very unlikely to join the military in the first place. In the same way you'll find very few straight white males majoring in black lesbian studies.

So when Navigator claims that the today's young soldiers aren't very
intelligent, I'm inclined to agree with him. Even if they are
intelligent in terms of iq, they're still extremely stupid in not
being able to make even simple logical deductions, let along how to
respond to a battlefield situation or how to operate a high-tech
weapon.

What you're characterizing as stupidity is mostly ignorance. You can't blame someone for not being able to solve calculus equations if they've never been trained to do so. I put the blame mostly on the public school system. But one thing the military does fairly well is training. Being around things that go boom tends to make that important. Perhaps ignorance may continue in some things, but soldiers tend to be well educated in their actual jobs.

But it's even worse than that. Soldiers who join the armed forces
should spend every waking hour developing the skills necessary to
fight a war. But now we're learning that after learning nothing in
college, they're going to spend their time in the army being lectured
about white privilege. So it appears that the soldiers in the armed
forces are going to be as stupid as AOC.

I believe that this was the point that Navigator was making.

The critical race theory stuff is just insane, but keep in mind that you're talking about an hour or two in a year with most of the victims, I mean participants, forgetting most of it immediately afterwards because they don't care about it.

[Xeraphim1]

I said aircraft carriers were vulnerable, not obsolete. The two current strains of thoughts are either: "Carriers are all but invincible" or "They're as useless as the battleship." I don't subscribe to either one, since they're still useful, but more vulnerable than some believe. How vulnerable they are will be discovered the hard way.

This is true, but then again carriers have always been vulnerable as WWII proved. I will suggest that the USN in particular has always recognized this and spent billions of dollars to defend them. Losing carriers would effectively put the USN out of business and the admirals are very sensitive to that.

If Navigator's words are true, that means I know more than most soldiers about past wars, and I'm an amateur. it's an interest of mine, so i wouldn't expect ordinary people to know all this, but I would expect those for whom this is their profession to have more knowledge than me. I won't pretend to know everything about that wars, but I do know a fair amount, including the First World War.

Right now, neither China nor the United States have enough of a stockpile for a weapons conflict. It would last no more than a few months and current production could not keep up with demand. Our military has no experience fighting a war where air and naval supremacy is not guaranteed. Vietnam was the last time we faced any serious opposition to our Air Force, with thousands of anti-aircraft guns and hundreds of surface-to-air missile launchers, chiefly the SA-2. In Iraq and Afghanistan, mechanical failure has been a bigger issue than enemy opposition, though some planes have been destroyed on the ground.

Fortunately, China is going to have the same issue. While they have the capability to take Taiwan, the losses in men and equipment would be massive, which takes time to replace.

Our military in terms of population is half the size it was 30 years ago, during the First Gulf War. We're extended all over the world, so while we might be stronger, China can concentrate all their strength in the South and East China Sea while we would both have to redeploy and train more troops. Since 2006, wargames have the United States lose the initial clash with China, not even taking into account how many of our satellites would be destroyed.

The size of the military has shrunk partly for budget reasons but also because there is not a need for as many people as we used to have. The American way over the past century been to substitute firepower for manpower and increasingly to use robots instead of people. There is no needs to draft hordes of cannon fodder because they would be less than useless; they'd actually make things worse for the military by sucking up resources. People are expensive. While not denigrating the threat that China poses, you should keep in mind that sometimes wargames have an intended audience outside the military; particularly Congress at budget time.

It would take both sides at least a year, probably more, to produce enough to keep up with demand. Mistakes early on in WWII cost us a few thousand lives, with improvements made after the Kasserine Pass. For the Soviet Union, millions died before they learned how to adapt.

And we've invested basically nothing in civil defense. The Soviet Union put much more effort into shelter their population than we did, considering a nuclear war to be winnable. Mutually assured destruction was never their policy, while we consider the effort pointless, with the belief of: "You can't survive a nuclear war; don't bother trying." Hopefully, this will change in an actual war. Even if the Chinese have 3,000 warheads capable of reaching us, though, it still wouldn't be enough to destroy our warmaking capability, nor wipe out all our warheads. During the Cold War, we had 12,000 targets, many of which had multiple warheads aimed at them.

The leaders of the Soviet Union certainly did understand that in a nuclear war they too were likely to die which is one of the reasons there hasn't been a great war in some 80 years now. Nuclear weapons really do change the equation and is the main reason so many states are trying to get them.

Prior to Pearl Harbor, we badly underestimated Japanese capabilities. Many conspiracy theories come from people struggling to believe we could really have been that complacent and unprepared. While it was well-executed, Japanese success came from a good luck of luck. So much could have gone wrong for them, right up to December 7th. We even ignored radar stations showing incoming Japanese aircraft, assuming them to be friendly B-17s. (They showed up in the middle of the air raid) If and when it happens, I won't be at all surprised if we see China pull off something similar.

I'll suggest that pre-1940 the intelligence services of the US were very undeveloped while the US itself was rather provincial in its outlook. Eighty years later the US is no longer Pollyannaish and is unlikely to get suckered again.

[Burner Prime]

For all you guys theorizing on how WWIII will begin, we have this laughable and hilarious article today where China supposedly reveals their Taiwan invasion plan. It is strictly a psy-op and for low-IQ consumption (including our low-IQ leadership). It assumes zero counterattacks, zero need for air superiority, zero response from Taiwan's allies. So it might be good as a mop-up operation, nothing more.

https://www.the-sun.com/news/3203525/ww ... ttle-plan/

The plan is straight outta WWII and is likely NOTHING like what they're really planning. What they're really doing right now is rapidly expanding their nuclear weapons capability in preparation to destroy US facilities in the area and the US mainland if necessary, while surviving a counter/first strike.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... story.html

They know full well any attack on Taiwan means war with the US, Japan, and probably Australia and India, while also forcing a NATO response. As I've said before the reason we are so serious about defending Taiwan is our extreme vulnerability due to lack of printed circuit manufacturing capability. The US does not make motherboards and can't build a lot of the other electronic boards that our military depends on. We make logic and memory, that's about it. TSMC and others do the heavy lifting. That's another reason why they are building a factory in Japan to reduce the site risk.

https://www.itpro.co.uk/hardware/359851 ... Company%20(TSMC,sources%20have%20told%20Nikkei%20Asia.

I knew this a long time ago, and now it looks like the MSM finally arrived late to the party (better late than never).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world- ... 1624075400

China knows this as well and it is factoring into their calculations. If they control Taiwan tech manufacturing the entire world will be at their mercy including any military, as it is extremely dependent on tech.

[Burner]

For your entertainment (or horror) this vid has been circulating, showing China, vs. Russia vs. US recruitment ads. The comments are the best part.

It illustrates why there is a good chance we will lose WWIII badly, and certainly why John is wrong about how seriously we view existential threats to "our way of life".

Or it could be a way to get the woke generation KIA and leave based people to inherit what's left.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfe6d6MzeLM

[Xeraphim1]

They know full well any attack on Taiwan means war with the US, Japan, and probably Australia and India, while also forcing a NATO response. As I've said before the reason we are so serious about defending Taiwan is our extreme vulnerability due to lack of printed circuit manufacturing capability. The US does not make motherboards and can't build a lot of the other electronic boards that our military depends on. We make logic and memory, that's about it. TSMC and others do the heavy lifting. That's another reason why they are building a factory in Japan to reduce the site risk.

China knows this as well and it is factoring into their calculations. If they control Taiwan tech manufacturing the entire world will be at their mercy including any military, as it is extremely dependent on tech.

It's quite likely that any invasion would risk destroying those very industries. If nothing else, I could see the Taiwanese government threatening to destroy them. And motherboards aren't the real issue since they're not difficult to make. The reason they're mostly made in Taiwan is due to cost factors. Adding production capacity for them in other countries wouldn't take long because they're not that sophisticated.

The real issue is that TSMC has some of the best processes for microchips right now; better than Samsung and also better than Intel which has some big disappointments lately. AMD, Apple and Nvidia source a lot of their production from TSMC and that would be very difficult to replace quickly. Samsung would be able to increase production to a certain extent while Intel could also boost it's efforts. GlobalFoundries also has three fabs in the US though they're 12nm and 14nm. Note that TSMC has started construction on a fab in Arizona with volume production starting in 2024. Looks like it will 5nm rather than the new 3nm, but that could change, especially with some government incentives.

[tim]

The leaders of the Soviet Union certainly did understand that in a nuclear war they too were likely to die which is one of the reasons there hasn't been a great war in some 80 years now. Nuclear weapons really do change the equation and is the main reason so many states are trying to get them.

The only reason there hasn't been a great war is because these countries did not enter the crisis period of the Fourth Turning.

The idea that nuclear weapons will not be used is going to get people killed who should be taking the time to prepare for it now.