Comments by "" (@SusCalvin) on "CaspianReport" channel.

  1. The Revolutionary Guard is an odd beast. It has a lot of autonomy, including from the parliament, the presidency and the theocratic guardian council. It has some organisational independence from the regular army and military intelligence service. I don't think the theocrats can tell the Revolutionary Guard exactly what to do. They have a lot of freedom to interpret their mission to safeguard the revolution. One function of the Revolutionary Guard is to act abroad. Revolutionary Guard members are part of Iran's influence in Syria, Iraq and other places.
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  2. North Korea are the ones doing most brinkmanship. They regularly do various saber-rattling stuff as they negotiate for something else.
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  3. It reminds me of how fast it took for Iran to band together against Saddam even when the post-revolution terror was still fresh.
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  4. There's a large chance an alien probe, if it landed somewhere random on the earth, would send back very interesting data on deep sea fish life.
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  5. The USSR arsenals mostly transfered to the different successor nations, with the nuclear arsenal in Russia. We didn't get to see a nuclear-armed post-soviet minor nation.
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  6.  Florian Cravic  In a dictatorship, loyalty and nepotism is your merit. You can't appoint someone who could threaten the monarch. Monarchies are like a family business where you all agree to conserve stuff within the family.
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  7. There is a whole slew of places that straddle the line of being a state without being recognized. Or they lack one supporting leg before they are a state.
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  8. I don't think Iran could be broken up either. The best hope I have is for something else to replace the current government.
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  9. There is a fair amount of industry in the north. In the northern coasts all around the Botnic Sea and up in the Arctic, towns cling in a line around the coast. Towns sprung up where the rivers met the sea so barges from the inland could meet sea-going ships. The rivers have been replaced in importance by the train nowadays but the important port towns remain.
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  10. A lot of dictatorships do that. Raw materials require less civilian development to dig up and ship out.
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  11. I also thought so. People largely banded together with the regime against Saddam.
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  12. Saudi Arabia has an expedition force in-country. I don't know how well they are doing.
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  13. I think it depends on how hard the Iranian central government has to suppress minorities. I'm not sure how religiously cohesive Iran had to be to fight Saddam.
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  14.  @Lestibournes  The nationalists on the israeli fringe talk about resettling millions of them somewhere outside the country instead. Right now they're effectively stateless people.
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  15.  @reredongy  Tora Bora turned out to be pretty small. Like a bunch of small, non-connected natural caves with maybe a door instead of a big Cobra Commander base or at least vietcong tunnels. It was more like places where you could stash weapons and a few guys sleeping, not the Taliban Maginot Line.
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  16.  @curtisthomas2670  The kurd enclave in Syria managed to come into being because the central government got very busy with other things than suppressing them. Like these groups don't need to be stronger than their respective governments, they need their respective governments to be busy elsewhere.
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  17. It sounds like communist Afghanistan was not very popular. They tried to change things too fast and was too obviously a foreign puppet. Maybe a normal country the same way Chechnya under Kadyrov today is a functional russian puppet.
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  18.  @johnpijano4786  The impression I get is that Saudi Arabia prefers to keep its own population paid off instead of cracking down. Citizens can stack a lot of benefits, and the migrant workers just get their wage and go home.
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  19. I'd like to see what China wants to do. I know they have kept channels with Afghanistan, Pakistan etc. They're an option for nations that don't want demands on democracy and such. The PRC hasn't stopped the ongoing korean republic's nuclear program, they're still a chinese client state.
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  20. The job of the army in a dictatorship is to prevent palace coups and keep down its own population. The second is rare in Saudi Arabia, the population seems to accept the wealth given. But the first happens, different parts of the royal house can compete for power. Then it's better to keep the army compartmentalized, no single uncle has enough personal power to topple the monarch.
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  21. Everyone in the North Sea/Baltic region is looking to claim some stake either in their own economic zones or further out.
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  22. My friend described kurd groups as a whole lot of local kurd groups. The kurd regional autonomy in Iraq is not the same as the kurd enclave in Syria etc.
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  23. What does China demand? When I read about them, they often seem focused on infrastructure, mining concessions, port access etc. They have less demands on democracy than actors from the EU might have.
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  24. It depends partly on how necessary their state believes a nuke is needed. A lot of nations, even those with no nuclear weapons ambitions, can have so many necessary bits that if they should start a program, they could do it in x years.
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  25. The latest rounds of israeli elections left a much weaker Netanyahu, depending on what had been a religous-ethnic nationalist fringe in earlier years for power. The longer he can stay in power, the longer he enjoys immunities from corruption trials. The people he depends on are the ones pushing for annexation now. They've seen Fatah as the primary threat to annexing the West Bank. Hamas and relations with the saudi are secondary for them.
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  26. I also think Iran is a bit more secular under the hood than it looks like when we deal with it's government. You could look at the war with Saddam, and how national cohesion worked then.
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  27. The other example I can think of is Egypt, where the army keeps turning up in everything from construction to the tourist industry.
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  28. I still think the EU would need to come to terms with being a wartime economy first. It is taking a few early steps in that direction. The EU is financing more of this and trying to push up production of materials with the manufacturing capacity at hand.
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  29. That's what I thought when I read about Israel starting to find allies of convenience in Saudi Arabia and their clients. The weakest point Iran can focus on isn't Israel. The importance of the israeli-palestinian conflict on the region isn't as dominant any more. A lot of the kingdoms have more important things than the future of Palestine on their hands.
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  30.  @mr.x90603  That's why the crown prince and a few others wants to jumpstart a diversified economy, I guess. I don't know how that will go if the royal house wants to avoid radical change to its own status.
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  31.  Florian Cravic  The US report I read thought individual units and soldiers can be effective. Some of these monarchies and ba'ath states have guard units who can measure up with modern combined arms tactics. But a lot of them are kept separated to avoid power concentration. The old soviet union and a bunch of other dictatorships used to have similar structures. You keep three-five security services and the second army around to keep eachother in line.
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  32.  @tunahxushi4669  A couple grand or three is still cheaper than a missile.
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  33. There is the Fatah party, who has deeper security cooperation with Israel than neither Israel or Fatah themselves want to talk about. From israeli governments, there was a boon in having two territorial authorities who occasionally skirmished. The less Fatah can show for this cooperation, the more room Hamas gets. The settler movement itself went from assassinating Rabin to sitting in on the government. They also really don't want to talk about the security cooperaton with Fatah, just how any split can be used to excuse new settlements. They're not a majority, but Likud and Netanyahu personally are starting to get fewer other allies willing to uphold his government.
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  34.  @TRYCLOPS1  The party likes to give the impression they are always watching. From what I understood, they focus on what they think can turn into organized non-party movements. You can probably yap on the internet like an isolated nobody or have private talks with your family but the party pays extra attention on independent churches, unions, local parties etc. Anything where people start to have an organization the party doesn't have insight and control in.
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  35. A lot of it available in mainstream media, academia and other open sources around the world. Sorting through and compiling it all s the daunting task. Like it's not too little information, but a torrential flood of information from the various actors.
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  36.  Two Natal Yods  The IDF looks like a functional force. They rely a lot on US aid and arms sales abroad. They don't look too keen on getting stuck in and actually invade one of their neighbours, and have a repeat of Libanon.
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  37.  @mattia8327  Contribution for their size is one way the NATO nations compare eachother.
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  38.  @GeneralGrievousCIS  The saudi public opinion is against Israel. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy so the crown prince has a lot more room to sign off whatever he wants without asking them. Saudi Arabia sits with Jordania as a buffer between them and the conflict. They and other neighbours don't really like the idea of some millions of refugees being directed towards them.
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  39. I'm always worried whenever someone gets the clever idea to press the armed forces into secondary and tertiary functions. It looks real tough to make the army do riot suppression and watch over train stations, suppress riots and search for drugs but then that becomes those unit's job. People can't train and outfit for everything. I'm not a fan of France's Operation Sentinel either, where they have small foot patrols of troops moving around on the subway and sitting on landmarks. Any soldiers you want to have sitting on the Louvre must be taken from somewhere else.
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  40. I think it depends on how close you are to Russia. A nationalist in France can have very different ideas than one in the Baltics.
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  41. From what I understand of Egypt, they are half-and-half cooperating with Israel to contain Hamas. Egypt has control over the other land border into Gaza and how much or how little goes through there.
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  42.  @Bakarost  I think the USA pulled out of the nuclear treaty. Now Iran says there is no longer any binding treaty.
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  43. Nations here come out a lot poorer and weaker after wars, not the other way around. We've had wars where states won themselves into poverty.
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  44.  @fasih-ur-rehman9630  Pakistan has one regional conflict going, the one with India. Sometimes it seems like the ISI likes having groups they can point in that general direction. Personally I don't think Pakistan gets any more safe from this. You don't want a porous border against chaos. I think there was an episode years back when some group of islamists started taking over pakistani provinces themselves too.
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  45.  @noonecares793  The USA keeps showing up and proclaiming that the locals should fight towards some new strategic goal the USA likes. War on terror, war on drugs, stop communism etc. They dump a bunch of resources and expects the locals to put all their old conflicts on hold to focus on the thing the USA wants.
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  46. "Attention-hungry wannabes" was how one of my friends described IS in comparison to al-Qaeda. Lots and lots of flash and press kits for a bunch who just managed to take over towns out in nowhere while everyone else was fighting over the cities and ports. Like if there was a massive siege of Detroit or LA with artillery levelling the city, and me and a few hundred friends roll into some small town in Montana and think we are the coolest guys around. We had a correspondant lecture about the fight who showed an overlay of the syrian population density over who controls what, and a lot of IS territory was out in the unpopulated interior.
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  47. I'm always a little confounded by the IRGC's role in Iran. They seem to have a lot of autonomy to define their role in safekeeping the revolution. It looked a bit like in Egypt or Pakistan where the armed forces have a weird role in the civvie economy as well. I thought they had some independence from the clerics themselves as well. I don't think Hezbollah could or even wants to enter Israel. The landscape sounds like there's more ground to give until Beirut is reached. Everyone loves rocket artillery these days. Rocket artillery has a huge role in Ukraine, and there's probably more of it coming in the EU nations.
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  48.  @lilimai4066  Egypt has an army like that. They have a weird mixing of business ownership and interests.
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  49.  @Kosinuss  A lot of the baltic navies have minesweepers and coastal patrol boats. I think Denmark, Sweden and Norway plus the russian baltic fleet are the powers with larger ships. And then the USA shows up with a single cruiser as a show of force, with more firepower than half a normal navy. :D
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  50.  @FrostedMike  The sunni-shia conflict reminds me a bit of old-school nationalist hatred in Europe. The states treated distrust of others like something they could have simmering underneath and then quickly start up when needed.
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  51.  @unitedwestanddividedwefall3521  I also remember that the expedition did not accomplish much. It was one of the first tests of how the Saudis could use all their weapons purchases. They were blockading harbours and airports, I recall. The houthis were launching into the Saudi hinterland.
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  52. Non-state actor is the more neutral term. This is not a show about ideologies and history. A lot of non-state actors have had political wings in the past and present without being states themselves. Northern Ireland and Catalonia had non-state actors with parliamentary representation. For me it would depend if Hezbollah would be able to assume a full government role over Lebanon or not.
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  53.  @stealthtowealth2167  I think Shirvan summed that up in an earlier video. "The USA does not lose wars, it loses interest". Sometimes regional actors don't think they can win against the USA, but can wait them out. The US doctrine is to have an absolutely bonkers capacity, like two simultanous wars or something. In Ukraine and Russia, I think the russian strategic arsenal is doing its job perfectly. It became rational to have a nuclear deterrent, because even the USA balks at that.
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  54. France is the other big empire. There are large chunks where French is the literal lingua franca.
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  55. I think the EU would need to come to terms with a wartime economy. On a central level, the EU wants to finance a lot more than it usually does. They are trying to scale up production with the facilities they have inside the EU right now. Everything is a big step compared to the predominantly soft power of the EU.
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  56. I'm always a bit worried whenever desperate people with firepower start to improvise.
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  57.  @Ameer-dj5gj  Sorry, my mistranslation. It should be Jordan. It's a constitutional monarchy in between Saudi Arabia and Israel. It has pretty far-going monarchist powers, with a parliament and crown-appointed government. It has accepted about two millon palestinians, and some million syrians.
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  58. I don't like a lot of the authoritarian governments. People like the saudi crown prince don't need to ask what people want.
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  59. It's still a mercenary if it's the taliban or a warlord in Sudan that pays their salary. As long as you can't state an iranian army rank and service number and wear a Republican Guard armband, you are some kind of weirdo irregular under international law. Mercenary groups can be more or less tied to a nation. The Wagner group in Russia is run by one of Putin's oligarch friends, and this reflects the sort of jobs they take. I doubt any NATO nation would take the bait if these guys showed up and offered their services as a truly neutral actor. WW II partisans could wear a "uniform" that consisted of an armband in theory, and claim POW status as long as they did it as an organised group.
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  60.  @carso1500  That's something I haven't seen many examples on. How does mercenaries react when they face high attrition. Like if someone inflicts 200 casualties on a mercenary company or blows up two herc heavy transports for them, how would they react to that?
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  61.  @amitbechor7575  What would you be ready to give Fatah, or are they just expected to be a vichy palestine forever? The West Bank is comparatively quiet, with low-intensity skirmishes between settlers and locals. Right now I'm more curious if Israel will take the step closer to the turkish definiton of democracy. And just how many fronts Netanyahu's partners would want him to open.
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  62.  @Baderasiri1  Israel buys the same sort of missile defence systems, I think. I think what people are looking at is the saudi mission in Yemen itself where it's putting all its purchased hardware to use.
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  63.  @mr.x90603  Actually bothering to collect tax is something simple we take for granted in democracies. A lot of dictatorships don't have tax. Revenues from some raw material or confiscations support the government.
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  64.  @hermaeusmora4874  There is a russian consulate on the island specifically to oversee that. They own a plot of land for it. Some of the island residents wanted to start a volunteer unit. I don't think it got approved. During wartime, the plans would be different.
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  65. The EU would need to figure out that it's in a wartime economy. Popular pressure has been to mitigate the economic consequences of the war for the population at home.
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  66. A bunch of european NATO nations tried similar concepts in the post-Cold War period, as part of the shift from territorial defence in Europe to expeditionary warfare. The IDF still relies a lot more on reservists and conscriptions than those states.
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  67. It's why I distrust people who want to build a high-tech fence and think this makes them look tough.
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  68.  @officegym7661  The last war in Lebanon ended on unclear terms. The IDF retreated out of Lebanon and Hezbollah survived with heavy losses. Both actors have this far wanted to avoid a repeat. It looked like both had an unspoken upper limit for escalation.
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  69. When compared, Iran is the stronger nation. Iran has something like double the population of Afghanistan, a vastly higher GDP and a functional nation-state. It would help if Iran could find partners inside Afghanistan, like they and the USA did with the Northern Alliance coalition of anti-taliban warlords. I think the issue would be Iran's other regional rivals. Anyone who wanted to sabotage that efford could easily find the right afghan warlords to support as proxies. Afghanistan's warlords seems like a pragmatic, negotiable bunch as long as they think they can get away with it. Any commitment of the iranian army would be unavailable back home.
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  70.  @Z__SH  Yeah, I think the other regional rivals of Iran wouldn't stop what they're doing to let Iran have a big regional war. Either there or in any of the other fields where they're proxies are active. Don't know what relations the house of Saud has with the taliban. Pakistan seemed more interested in their rivalry with India, and keeping a buffer against themselves. The afghan warlords themselves seem like a negotiable bunch. It looks like the taliban are back to their war on opium right now. The taliban have inherited a few of the reasons why the old US puppet government was heavily centralized.
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  71. You join the home guard. The government militia. An armed populace in traditional euro armies means conscription.
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  72. I know the soviet union allowed materials to be produced locally on license throughout the world as well.
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  73. Using less resources is a lot harder for consumers and voters to stomach.
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  74. One actor I'm missing in this part is Fatah. The Fatah faction under Abbas still rules the territorial authority on the West Bank.
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  75. This is a geopolitics show, and individual human stories tend to disappear in that angle. The show has discussed other conflicts without human stories as well, why would this be different.
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  76. Right now I think a different Iran would not come from breaking up the country. It needs something to replace the guardian council and the IRGC.
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  77. Drones are a lot cheaper and a lot easier to use. You can get cheap drones on the civvie market, unlike the first Gulf War when this was the cool new thing. They're expendable, in Ukraine they're a consumable like other military goods.
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  78. I think there was an episde years back when islamists took over provinces in Pakistan itself for a while. I can't imagine that being terribly popular.
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  79. They're not intended for promotion, I think. Just to fill gaps on the front. The army command is still controlled by the state. That was how european armies looked, a century or two ago. People joined the army because it paid more than minimum wage for an unskilled day laborer.
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  80. It's like bits of countryside arguing for who is most countryside.
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  81. You could use less transatlantic shipping. Make do with less industrialized fishing. Fixating on the wind farms when this is already a heavily exploited area is odd.
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  82.  @laminarflowone  The internal israeli criticism expanded it a little more. Overrelying on video surveillance on the fence, and then cutting back on staff for it. Hamas planning for an earlier attack, and israeli military intelligence interpreting the postponed attack as a cancellation. A lot of technical surveillance to compensate for the lack of partners and informers in Gaza.
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  83.  @davidtrak2679  Their function is regime preservation. It's not super unique, other dictatorships have used compartmentalization of security forces. They folded some of the uprising suppression militias that used to be more independent under the IRGC a few years ago.
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  84. I think that the more the IDF must become an internal security force for suppressing the territories, the less it can be an external defence force. Those are very different functions. I don't like it when anyone here gets ideas for "let the army do x, y and z" either. The more extra functions the army must perform, the less it can do external defence.
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  85. The armies of early modern period Europe starts to do that. You have big national armies, but those armies bulk out by recruiting dudes as they go. But this is the point where central national power starts to grow. You can't set up a stone fort with a dozen dudes and claim yourself baron of some valley any more.
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  86.  @carso1500  It looks like plenty of mercenaries and contractors fill out the background jobs in modern industrial armies. It's not like 1910 Europe when the army made its own railway line when needed. A lot of a modern army in Europe relies on civilian suppliers and civilian hospitals. A job on the motor pool in Afghanistan is still a risky job in a combat zone, but you're not going to start a warlord career there.
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  87. I thought the army of Egypt also has that sort of weird business links where construction, tourism etc can be run as army companies.
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  88. The USA has a few bases in the area. Qatar has one.
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  89.  @kingace6186  Yeah, I agree that they have that separation from the regular armed forces for reasons like that. A lot of dictatorships have the second army or the second police when they don't fully trust other parts of the state.
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  90.  @kamikaziking  The US president can sack military leaders. The iranian president, or the theocrat judges in the guardian council, can not.
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  91. I would like to see how much of the IDF can be tied up in internal security without compromising external and vice versa. Civilian suppression and external defence are very different jobs, usually done by different parts of the state. In other nations I've looked at, units pressed into other uses than military starts to reshape. A military unit used as a SWAT unit or riot cops often enough will become that at the cost of their military role. A bunch of people can't train for too many roles and functions. Another part is how Israel's relation with its neighbours changes. Negotiations with Saudi Arabia is relatively easy. Anyone negotiates with the crown prince directly, who does not need a popular mandate. Internally and unrelated to the military side, I was worried that Israel would start to push closer to the turkish definition of democracy. One where less can stand in the way of a parliamentary majority and government, and where the PM becomes harder to remove. Settlers getting to operate a paramilitary state within the state is a little janky. In euroland, there is an increasing interest in reservists and conscription. The armed forces can't be the tip of the tip of the spear.
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  92.  @Pathanaelnerson  By comparison, the UK royal house traditonally has princes serving in the army. One of them was in Afghanistan.
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  93.  @Kosinuss  One small detail people sometimes overlook is transport ships. Without them, any kind of amphibious operation would be harder and struggle with supply issues. Kaliningrad has a few amphibious units sitting around, I think. But as this man says, most of it is security units to hold the place and interfere with others.
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  94.  @rocksmo3384  If anyone just sits still and recognise that the borders of 1890 are the final ones, it'll be peaceful. Or the ones in 1918. Or 1945. Or maybe 1990.
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  95.  @rocksmo3384  The rule of thumb in Europe was that treaties lasted until the next war and the next treaty. They had a sort of understanding that the balance of power can never be permanent and always adjusts. And that it s never history nerds who win wars. History nerds can show up afterwards and write a nice excuse once the army has decided how things will be. Untl the next war, of course.
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  96. It's the eternal conflict that constantly seems to pull the rest of us into it with how weird it's all constructed. It creates awkward questions like "What is a nation?" that most of us never have reason to bother with. I personally blame the UK colonial administrations. They had a small share of adventuring amateur geographers and a large share of public school idiot chums who mostly wanted cash crops and a port.
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  97.  @timryan3054  "Mujahedeen" here refers to anyone fighting the soviets and their communist puppet government, including foreign non-taliban jihadists and clan militias and maybe the odd nationalist? While the taliban is one specific group of locals coming out on top afterwards.
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  98.  @jamesburke3803  The harassment there would be from iranian proxies I guess, robot strikes and raids. The syrian-arab state is just barely starting to consolidate its hold. It's more about what they wouldn't be able to do, like police others.
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  99.  @gvibration1  A lot of the enlightenment states we had were not close to modern democracies and had no intention of going there. That took a whole lot more work than just flicking on the enlightenment.
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  100. The USA/NATO is learning a lot. They have a better understanding of how to work with local power structures. I think Afghanistan is a good example of just those lessons from Vietnam. On the other hand, it needs to unlearn a lot of this if it wants to fight a war with another major power. This sort of low-intensity expedition action is not very close to what an escalation in Ukraine or the South China Sea might look like. Afghanistan is a place where you don't need to worry about signals warfare, enemy air cover etc. How many times would the taliban launch a cruise missile on a US base, kind of.
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  101. What are the other former European colonial powers doing? French dominions and the British commonwealth are not the only ones who were client states or colonies of European powers large and small.
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  102.  @vorynrosethorn903  The power grid was part of the civil defence for a reason. They can still conscript work crews for cables the same way they can keep hospital workers and rail workers. In wartime, the main focus is to keep power on in sensitive locations like hospitals, the water plant etc. It's hard for any civilian infrastructure to keep operating. Civilian airlines would be grounded, civilian shipping would have a hard time.
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  103.  @aaronscottmatthews7883  Oh boy! Ha ha!
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  104.  @michaelscott5653  I don't think there is any serious US call for Iranian separatist groups either. During the last round of protests they started in one corner but spread over ethnic lines. People were raging because the morality police had killed people. It's not a failed state like Afghanistan with warlords on warlords, it's a fully operational nation-state.
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  105.  @bar1825  Wasn't there a lot more groups in Iran as well? Iran is a strongly centralized nation but not as weak as the Afghan national government was, where the central government just ended outside Kabul.
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  106. Ukraine was already an arms exporter before the war. They had an arms industry, but it was geared towards export. The army itself relied on older stores.
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  107. ​ @rfarchi  Like the equivalent of bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail, but it passes through set logistics hubs? The Saudis were blockading ports for a while. Unfortunately those are also used by regular yemenites who want food.
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  108.  @Tunahater  The current government talked about annexing all palestinian territories several months ago already. The israeli hawks have already been in power for years.
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  109.  @Lestibournes  I think the hawks in Israel got too comfortable with Hamas and spent too much time pressuring Fatah. They could try suppressing Fatah enough that Hamas replace them entirely and see how that works.
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  110.  @Lestibournes  It's like saying Hamas shouldn't be such a high priority, compared to every single palestinian out there. Hamas should have no special priority. The israeli election brought the fringe of Israel into more power, with a weaker likud than before. And they want more protection, more leeway than others in Israel.
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  111. That's something I don't know. How does mercenary companies deal with attrition? What would happen if Blackwater lost 200 dudes one day or got a herc blown out of the sky?
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  112. I'm much more interested in alternatives to the current government. I know there's plenty of iranians in exile.
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  113.  @amirhoomanhosseini6144  I also think Iran is a lot more secular under the hood then the state would like. But I have no idea who would win the first Iranian democratic election. The oldest example I can recall is the war with Saddam. The state did not unify Iran around religion, at least not fully. And in the last protests after the morality police had killed some people, they spread over ethnic lines. It's also why I fear letting the Iranian government get a big, external enemy. The war with Saddam was not long after the terror of the revolution. It reminds me a lot of old nationalism in Europe where the states tried to use national animosity as something to tune on and off like a tap to fit the daily need.
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  114. Shirvan always focus on the basic practicalities of conflicts. Individual humans start to lose their significance when geopolitics is applied to it. This is how we have discussed other conflicts around the world to try understanding states and other actors, why shouldn't we do the same with this one.
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  115. The mujahadeen groups have a kind of fallout between eachother after the soviet withdrawal and the fall of the soviet-backed government. There's fighting in Kabul between them. A group of these guys from pakistani religious schools end up taking power, and become the taliban we know in 2000. I think weapons have a way of finding their way into the second-hand market in warzones either way. You can't control who loots them, trades them, leaves them in a pile etc. The communist government had piles of stuff the soviets had left behind or supported them with added to that.
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  116.  @ArawnOfAnnwn  The most functional right now at least, I think. al-Assad in Syria is busy trying to consolidate the syrian-arab state. Saddam was regime changed by the USA and I think the kurds got some regional authority out of it. Turkey is the one who would have the most territory at stake in a hypothetical Kurdistan, and has some sort of domino theory where they think kurd autonomy in its neighbours could lead to kurd autonomy calls at home.
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  117.  @Tyrach.  Iran has a long-standing feud with the Taliban. At times, they supported the same warlords as the USA. They still did not like a huge US presence right next doors.
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  118.  @yakov95000  I'm always cautious whenever the armed forces are pressed into roles other than external defence. It looks tough at first, but it forces them to adapt and change into the new roles the longer it goes on. There's always someone who wants to feel tough by making the army search for drugs, hang around and guard stuff etc. If the IDF's main job increasingly becomes to watch over peasants and babysit settlers and suppress riots, that is what units will prepare for. And if the IDF thinks an air force that can reach and threaten Iran is their best offensive option, a large long-range air force is what they get. No armed force (except the USA, 'cause superpower) have a do-everything capacity. I don't like the french Op Sentinel either, where they have small troops of soldiers on foot watching landmarks and taking the subway. Any troops they need too rotate to sit on the Louvre are not going to be used elsewhere. The soviet/russian OMON units are entirely security troops for riot duties, uprising suppression and coup defence. They are at best third line security units in a hot war. Using them on the front is like trying to figure out how to make the SWAT team fight tanks.
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  119.  @exudeku  Rhodesia was too bad at building an army and winning wars and stopped existing because of that. It looks like the story of many other ethnic/tribal conflicts. They're at war with a ludicrous amount of neighbours at the end, plus large parts of their own population.
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  120. Wahhabism and salafism is a much more specific description, and that helps. The stupid happens when folks think any new mosque is a "victory mosque". Wahhabism looks more like the ideological/spiritual influence of Saudi Arabia and their absolute monarchy. I don't know if I would call Saudi Arabia fascist though, they're twats because they are an absolute monarchy who keeps having proxy fights with the iranians. You can find a bunch of muslims in Europe who dislike these guys. Like if some foreign pastor showed up one day at your church and started telling you that he's in charge from now on, and his interpretation is the only accepted one. A bunch of these new guys are more like isolationist puritans than violent political activists.
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  121.  @sorkenyo  A lot of the ones I see aren't necessarily militant. They are still all about internal moral control and separation. Some guy from Pakistan with or without saudi money shows up to tell all the locals how wrong and sinful they are, and how he is now the moral authority in town. Even a dude trying to non-violently shame my neighbours and their kids into withdrawing all contact with the majority society around them is a twat.
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  122. That border is a long, unpopulated stretch of desert and rocks I believe. Pre-motorization foot and horse armies had a hard time crossing that sort of terrain, so you could treat deserts like a natural border.
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  123. @Dhuku .10 Manufacturing by license, sort of? Setting up an entirely homegrown arms industry is a pretty big step for a regional power.
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  124. We run a combination of rail and merchant marine. The ships can't get up on land and drive to the mine yet. Rail lines usually connect something in the interior with a port.
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  125. I think that is hard to combine with Greater Hungary or France First.
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  126. The IDF is ludicrously well armed. Saudi Arabia is ridiculously armed, they're still welcome on arms markets here. All these actors are much heavier armed than most EU nations.
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  127.  @ivancho5854  I'd also like to know how far these projects have gone, and who is supposed to develop them. There would need to be a lot more pipeline construction to handle gas. The russian pipelines that suppled parts of the EU didn't materialize overnight either. I'm not saying it's impossible, I just doubt it would be set to work after a year.
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  128. I'm always a little nervous when finance starts to believe economy must revolve around the needs of finance. Instead of treating finance as a support buerocracy for the rest.
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  129.  @hazb8026  The "Cod War" with Iceland was not a military conflict, only a very intense economic one.
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  130. The actors who want to dissuade attackers by building a nuclear arsenal are relatively open about their strategic arsenals. I can't threaten you with an option you don't know exists.
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  131. Afghanistan is a dysfunctional failed state compared to Iran. The Taliban don't have dang drone factories.
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  132. I want to see if the Netanyahu government will still stand after the war. Last time I checked, Netanyahu was happy to let people in the IDF and the intelligence community accept blame as nothing falls on him. What can Likud do, blame the opposition when they've been the ones holding on to power for years on end now. Or the ultranationalists, when this happens during their first stint in power.
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  133.  @hidum5779  Yeah, the PRC is never doing stuff out of good intentions. They want a string of client states.
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  134.  @hidum5779  A lot of them don't want to be full-blown chinese clients, they want to balance between the power blocks. I think it's possible for some of them to make it as middle men between the now growing global blocks. It's not a guaranteed success. Belarus is far from a middle man now, and increasingly starts to look like a russian client state as well.
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  135.  @effexon  Desalination is extremely expensive compared to a river and requires huge amounts of power. It is a thing economists and other people with no understanding of industry dream of.
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  136.  @WarPigstheHun  Let's build a salt-water swamp in Iran, sort of.
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  137. I'd accept that at least the big flood isn't the army's doing.
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  138. A world where first-strike nuclear use is the new normal wouldn't be nice. I think a lot of smaller states in the region or otherwise would start taking up their own nuclear programs.
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  139.  @nataliamundell6266  The art market is a tax evasion and money laundering scheme.
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  140. In a show about geopolitics, the personal human stories tend to disappear. This is how we talk about other conflicts and the pure balance of power.
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  141. The EU has its own conflicts with Turkey. Turkey's conflict with Greece over Cyprys is a long-standing issue in both the EU and NATO. Erdogan keeps demanding money and eventual favors for his cooperation. Erdogan has threatened to pull his cooperation two times now. Slowly turning into a Turkish client state because we can't imagine dealing refugees isn't doing us well, I believe. The EU used to hold membership status as their big carrot for Turkey, but that is plain dead right now. Instead they think money will solve things. What is the current relation between Damaskus and Ankara? The official policy of the syrian government has always been that all syrian territory should return to syrian government control. And a large amount of Erdogan-supported mercenaries hanging around is not "syrian government control" in the slightest.
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  142. ​ @EenYouTubeGebruiker Bibi always comes off as a power balance man to me. Similar to how Erdogan try to balance between NATO, the EU, Russia, Saudi Arabia without clearly becoming a client of one.
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  143. I'm always happy to blame the british colonial administrations around the world. They always seem like a small part adventuring but enthusiastic amateur geographers, and a large part public school idiots.
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  144.  @Akech101  There's the ba'ath movement. But they mostly seem to produce authoritarian dynasties.
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  145. Or doing anything that would inconvenience voters. Removing a popular subsidy for example.
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  146.  @yahiaelshakhs4283  Saudi Arabia is making the rounds on arms markets right now. They are buying ludicrous amounts of stuff. Their armed forces themselves are still organized as a coup defence to make sure a palace coup won't happen.
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  147. The US-supported afghan federal government was also a centralized thing. A lot of governors and strongmen out in the provinces continued to do as they liked. Including getting back into the opium trade they'd opposed the taliban over.
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  148. I wouldn't like it if some warlord with a private militia outside any control took over my town.
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  149. That's one of the bits I lack right now. How well does mercenaries do in high-attrition modern mechanized warfare. Riding shotgun for some dudes from the consulate or flying a transport is one thing, But what do you do when the conflict starts to involve people who can and will blow an entire plane with mercs out of the sky.
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  150. If the IDF would want to commit to permanent patrols in Gaza, and a direct israeli administration of the territory and its inhabitants. Instead of installing some puppet.
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  151.  @Ali-bu6lo  I understood that the parliament and by extension the government is fairly neutered. There are elections, but candidates must be vetted by the guardian council who forms a sort of... I think theocratic supreme court. The revolutionary guard corps is a strange thing. From what I understand, they have a fairly broad mandate to preserve the revolution. With a lot of autonomy in how they do this, including from several theocrats. They are separate from many other iranian state instruments. If the theocrats were removed completely for some reason, the revolutionary guard would be a functional miltary government with a legitimacy problem.
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  152. It reminded me a lot of old European nationalism. The European nations liked to have a simmering understanding in the population that those other people are different. And then turn on and direct the nationalist hatred as necessary. They could have a religious component but it was not critical.
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  153. The best previous example I can think of is the last israeli invasion into Lebanon. Hezbollah suffered great casualties but the IDF withdrew without their destruction. I think every generation has people who claim that we now have the last necessary tool for the pure air war. And every generation this far they have been wrong, as bomber planes and cruise missiles fail to take and hold ground.
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  154.  @user-op8fg3ny3j  The monarchy at my home survived through powerlessness. It did not really protest when parliament started to take more of its role bit by bit and it became a figurehead government. Conservative monarchists dwindled. I can't criticize the monarch for any position because the monarch has no official position, or how the monarch uses his power because he has none. I do not know what the monarch thinks of the EU, the cod fishing etc.
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  155. Conscription is the traditional way around such worries.
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  156. Water is one of the most valuable resources. A lot of the conflict spots are not over the deep desert, but the arable areas. People don't fight over the desert, but they fight over an olive grove.
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  157. The EU is never very good at dealing with a crisis. The structure of the EU is built to debate fishing quotas and tax on sausages, not deal with emergencies. It's run as a consensus, it is hard to force a single EU member to do something. The other EU members can apply other pressure but often prefers to negotiate around the problem and create exceptions. To me it looks like only a slight improvement over the inaction during the balkan wars. The EU doesn't like having a warzone next doors, no-one does. But it still lacks the means to act cohesively. It picks the path of least resistance now instead of what might be viable long-term. Right now the EU does not like it's sudden reliance on Erdogan and whatever Libyan warlords it has to cooperate with, but currently it looks like the easiest way to avoid confrontation between EU members.
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  158. What sort of allies can China count on in the region?
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  159. The IRGC has a mission to preserve the revolution. They have a broad mandate to act separate from and police other state agencies.
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  160.  @Eddies_Bra-att-ha-grejer  The north is dominated by a handful of industrial mid-sized towns along the coast.
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  161. I think this was one of the issues that created tension between the taliban in Kabul and different opium-growing local strongmen during their first tenure in government. The taliban weren't a strong central government either.
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  162.  @alexanderzwollo3825  There is a number of mining possibilities. This has come up in their relation with the PRC, the party likes to pick up mining concessions from weird places without asking too many questions about local stuff. The taliban used to oppose opium growth for a bit. A lot of the growing is done by whatever local strongman who influences the province.
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  163.  @nathanreay3234  You can grow some foodstuff in Afghanistan. Transporting it out is more expensive. Opium is a lot more valuable for its weight than tomatoes and more affordable to transport when infrastructure is crappy.
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  164.  @agentsteell  The CCP seems a bit interested in mining concessions. I guess security and US influence was holding them back. The party is one of the neighbouring entities which has kept embassies in Kabul.
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  165. What are Afghanistan's neighbours up to? I know their greatest support came from Pakistan. Russia and China kept their embassies in Kabul when the NATO nations evacuated.
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  166. ​ @abhishekprasad000  I still fear the City for other reasons. It's my personal nightmare when finance starts to believe they are the prime driving force and begins to bloat.
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  167. I didn't expect it either. Not at this scale. I suspect Hamas didn't know it would be able to penetrate as deep either. What's the idea for the West Bank? Right now I'm more worried that the settlers will get to keep operating like a state within the state, and push the nation closer to the turkish definition of democracy. One where elections are held, but the head of state is increasingly hard to remove and the nation starts to affect a much more religious nature.
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  168.  @WillyKling  I knew they had an arsenal o rockets. And now we know they planned a raid into Israel for some time and postponed it once.
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  169. Part of it is how much incentive and will a state has. A lot of states, even ones with no weapons ambitions, are x years from a weapon. If they should start one. The EU was trying to negotiate for a halted program, but the USA pulled out.
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  170.  @duckpotat9818  My impression was that the existing members of the nuclear club generally prefer to keep it exclusive.
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  171. How does mercenary companies deal with attrition? If their contractors start to rack up high casualties and loss of equipment during a job.
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  172. From what I understand it's theoretically possible but practically very convoluted to naturalize as an israeli citizen. People from the territories could get work permits to do various jobs around the rest of Israel. Last thing I heard, Netanyahu was being offered a coalition government. A lot of other military and intelligence community heads seem ready to resign after the war, but not him. I don't know if this could be the final thing that topples Netanyahu or not. What is he supposed to do, say that he and the other Likud hawks have not been in power for over a decade. The one actor I'm missing in this is Fatah, or rather the Fatah branch under Abbas. The man must be 80+ by now but controls the territorial authority on the West Bank. They have a few legitmacy issues as well. There's been no new elections in some time, and the more time passes the more palestinians see them as a bunch of quislings. Their finances are run through Israel, who could cut that off if they dislike a choice in future leaders.
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  173. I thought that much. When one armed group wants to be the new guys in charge, there's going to be a bunch of folks not in charge to convince. That was still part of the conflict, I think. One clan or the other has a feud, and just see the coalition as one more way to continue that feud. One of the big coalition projects was the Afghan National Army they imagined would stand for a united afghan government. I don't know what state this organisation is in at the moment.
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  174. They become less popular during the early modern period, where early nation-states start to rise in Europe. The crowns of Europe don't really like having weird little baronets sitting in a stone keep with a dozen armed guys all over. Armies still consist of guys you hire on the way, but independent companies of armed men wandering around become less liked.
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  175. I think Hezbollah and the IDF both came out undecisive in that conflict. Hezbollah remained after heavy casualties, the IDF pulled out.
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  176.  @carso1500  But as mentioned here, a lot of mercenaries are not working for modern western nations. 2000 guys with some artillery who decide that a town in the Balkans or in Afghanistan is theirs isn't so easy to do something about, not when the central government is weak or busy elsewhere.
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  177.  @wilhelmvonlaer5699  Macchiavelli lives in a time when private condottieri armies are swindling city-states.
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  178.  @Spider-Too-Too  Who is leaving? Mercenaries?
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  179.  @Spider-Too-Too  When you're part of a national army, it's often the neighbouring nation that tracks you. If a body of armed canadian soldiers get up and start moving past a border crossing in uniform the USA would have to take it as an invasion. The same if a bunch of unmarked canadians in an unmarked armoured car does the same. It doesn't have to be serious, we've had small units of troops getting lost in blizzards and technically crossing a border up in the mountains without starting a war. There are events when a nation looks the other way for volunteers. It depends on their relation with the neighbour and their unofficial stance on the conflict. There was people in WW II that took a "vacation" from national service and ended up fighting german or soviet troops, and were allowed back into normal service afterwards with the silent approval of the national government.
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  180. My older relatives do not describe the Cold War as glorious. They describe bad shoes, being forced off their civ job and general suck. But at least you share the suck.
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  181. Britain during its height of empire has that sort of professional army. They don't have a mass conscription system like the other great powers of Europe. They have this small, professional corps they can quickly send on expeditionary wars. It's an army that can show up to fight boer or afghani or indian rebels. Professional soldiers don't have a second job that remains unfilled or a harvest unpicked if you send them on the troopship to fight the boxers in China alongside the colonial militia. When the great war begins, it's this army that lands in France and gets depleted. And they have to learn on the go how conscription works, and join in what the other great powers already do. It's not like the US draft where you decide a war is coming and start a lottery. It's a rolling system where the 18 year olds of generation after generation are pushed through the system and ends up trained and placed in the war organisation. And when the day comes for the Great War, the powers just pull a switch and the mobilization happens. The armies of Europe during the Cold War used conscription. It was armies in the millions built to fight off the Soviet Union. The big reason we started to dismantle all that wasn't efficiency, it was the sudden lack of a Soviet Union. A large, expensive system motivated by the need to defend against the commies is much harder to justify when the commies just crumble in front of everyone in the 90's. A small corps of troops is better if you think the new wars are going to be small police actions along the UN/NATO, like Afghanistan or Kosovo or Kongo where you support a greater US force.
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  182.  @toxicbleach3304  They are motivated to do things that fit what we use them for. The conscript armies of Cold War Europe was there to defend themselves from the Soviet Union. Those armies were usually not meant for extensive expeditions, they were meant to hold and take back territory from the commies. Conscripts have day jobs. Manpower is not just how many free dudes you have that can go into the army, it represents the national workforce. If I mobilize 500 000 guys, that's 500 000 guys who wouldn't do their jobs in the timber industry or schools. The same if I want 500 000 guys who are professional soldiers, except they won't have any day job.
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  183.  @dopey0682  A lot of the EU nations are also NATO nations in parallell. A lot of them seems to think that this is a working arrangement, with no need to build parallell structures. A lot of work in the NATO partnership is about integrating all these national armies with eachother. Some logistics dude in Norway should be able to receive French and US troops under local French command if necessary. The EU does a lot of security stuff outside the purely military sphere. Anti-terrorism, smuggling, disaster relief etc happens in the different EU spheres. The EU has some security guarantees but they are weaker than the NATO ones.
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  184.  @toxicbleach3304  The guys the taliban pay a handful of dollar for each US soldier they blow up are also mercenaries. They aren't necessarily ideologically convinced, but a few hundred bucks is something.
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  185.  @toxicbleach3304  You can motivate people in the national service. For most part of the Cold War, that motivation was the soviet union. People are willing to put up with a lot if it's for national territorial defence. There's a bunch of side effects with national service. It's harder to do it like in the 18th century and set the army on the civilian population when the army and the civilian population are one and the same. People started demanding respect and participation based on their service.
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  186.  @misterjei  The EU members are often also NATO members. A few of them think a more european-centered force would be better, most prefer the parallell EU and NATO membership. The EU runs a number of security arrangements at the moments, mostly related to civilian smuggling, terrorism etc.
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  187.  @dopey0682  I think it's the same reason the USA has a presence in places like Qatar, South Korea etc. The USA needs a system of logistical bases to project force across the entire heckin' globe. When a US soldier gets shot in Iraq, they can get transported to a hospital in Germany. They can use the air base in Qatar to launch air sorties. The US soldiers matching the Chinese military presence sleep and eat at Okinawa. Some NATO members like Denmark have a lot of respect, because their contribution in Iraq and other places matches their small size. NATO and NATO partner troops often have some presence during US expeditionary wars.
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  188. You can adjust the training of national service and militia troops if you like. Make the training three years or five years if you like. Or adjust the number of people pulled into national service from the manpower pool down. The lesson in the Great War was that experience does not stop attrition during prolonged conflict. The UK used to have a professional army in 1910 that they used to send on expeditionary wars in the colonies to supplement the local colonial troops. By 1917, that army is gone.
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  189.  @dopey0682  Should the USA have a controlling stake and presence in the Pacific Ocean, for example? Part of that control is your presence at Okinawa.
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  190.  @normjohnson4629  Industrial nation-states still have logistics and weapon systems for fighting things their own scale. I don't think a mercenary aircraft carrier would turn a profit right now. Mercenaries is not just US veteran rangers with good private sector pay. The guy who gets paid $200 to dig down an improvised mine and the clan/town militia you can rent are the kind of low-level mercenaries we see around small conflicts. They show up in places like Syria, Ukraine, Tunisia. Third line home guard/militia units could play a role in the Balkans by relieving regular troops of garrison jobs. A lot of mercenaries seems to fill in blanks rather than replace the national army. They try to avoid larger costs themselves, like recruiting veterans instead of paying for their own basic training camps. A guy working on the motor pool in Afghanistan is still doing a bit of a risk job. More than a normal civilian mechanic from stateside would accept. Air power looks like an important part of that battle. The US and russian advisors and their air assets make a sort of complicated dance around eachother. The russians have that kind of air support in the region as well, but I think duelling with US aircraft was more than they wanted.
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  191.  @normjohnson4629  The armies of Cold War Europe had large, cheap home guard/militia units. Their job wasn't necessarily to destroy the enemy. They would never be deployed outside the nation. Their job is to stay in reserve at their local area, activate fast and provide a blocking force until national and NATO forces can show up. There is a role for all sorts of second-line units who aren't the tip-of-the-spear guys. People who guard airfields, direct traffic, keep spetsnaz off the railroad, blow their local bridge when ordered to.
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  192. A lot of wars are not existential wars. They don't end with the total destruction of the enemy. A lot of wars in Europe used to end with treaties. A province swaps allegiance to a different crown and a peace settles in until the next war comes. The exceptions are much worse, like the two world wars or Ceasar's campaigns in Gaul. When it's really about the survival of a culture or the other.
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  193. I think Cold War conscription was always impopular. But you could justify it by pointing to the Soviets.
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  194. Existing members of the nuclear club does not, as a rule of thumb, like nuclear-armed allies.
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  195. I think Netanyahu tries to balance a great deal of stuff, saying what he needs to say to the right crowd.
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  196.  @tiglishnobody8750  Including that. It might not be a realpolitik balance others like. And its a lot harder now when things he says in one crowd is picked up in others. I think the man needs to go, now that his whole balance has broken up.
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  197.  @paolotorres8537  Which state organs can the president and the theocrats control? They have a regular army that seems largely responsible for territorial defence. There's a variety of military intelligence and security organs.
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  198.  @lilimai4066  What is the role of the regular army in Iran? I thought their primary role was territorial defence of Iran itself. They can't use Revolutionary Guard dudes for everything.
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  199.  @kamikaziking  We got to live next to these dudes and their crap, so that's what I compare with. Like if an element of the US armed forces could decide to start its own war and pursue foreign policy independently.
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  200.  @kamikaziking  That or the dudes next doors who have an absolute monarchy and got caught executing a guy at an embassy. Where a palace coup is one of the only real recourses between the princes.
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  201.  @kamikaziking  I'd prefer to live in the USA instead of the military regimes in Iran or weak South Am democracies.
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  202.  @kamikaziking  The House of Saud and Iran have a few proxy conflicts with eachother in the region. I don't like either of them. They have a tendency to pull other places down with them.
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  203.  @kamikaziking  I'm just saying that Iran is a military dictatorship, and that's what I got to compare other nations to.
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  204. The EU was in favor of a deal that would limit the Iranian nuclear program. The USA was not.
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  205.  @jjr5233  Right now that is pretty much off the table.
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  206. Both the palestinian territorial authorities run their finances through Israel. The alternative for Israel would be to assume direct administration and patrols of the territories or directly install a puppet.
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  207. I think Cold War spending levels were justified with the Soviet Union. Then the Union fell, there was the war in Chechnya and actual military capacity in Russia was shown. Right now I still think of Russia as an aggressive regional power. It can threaten many smaller parts of Europe. I think it depends on how far from Russia you are. A nationalist in Latvia thinks Russia is a major threat, but in France you can take a Russian loan and run for president.
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  208.  @AnthonyAfrikaans  It's the nickname the israeli public calls him, a lot of people there refer to him as Bibi. The dude has been in power for quite a while now.
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  209.  @Gizziiusa  I don't know if Netanyahu could remain in power. Last time I checked, he was happy to be the one man out who did not want to take personal responsibility after the war. Netanyahu still wants to be the sun all emanates from personally, and at the same time powerless to the intellgence community and armed forces and the opposition.
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  210.  @dcanedemboyz7431  The army here was historically a place for lower class recruits and the lower aristocracy. A career path as an officer (as well as the buerocracy) was one way up for aristocrats when 20-something high aristocratic families had consolidated most land outside the church and crown. It's still a world apart from an enlisted bloke or sailor.
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  211. As a rule of thumb, nations do not like to have uncontrolled power voids next doors. Then you have no idea who moves into power instead. Or the conflict could keep going, and start to destabilize the rest of the region.
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  212. I remember that the Shah was into that too. Like building a great long national history. It reminds me a lot of nationalism in Europe where weird locals were shoved into national boundaries.
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  213. The good migrant used to be a Russian with large amounts of cash looking to buy real estate. Britain is sanctioning itself out of the single market.
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  214.  @sergpie  Large bits of Europe also had middle to upper class Russians, and have decided that money laundering in wartime is maybe not that good.
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  215. No one likes it when a neighbouring state turns into a failed state. Even a state you dislike is sometimes preferable to an unpredictable black hole on the map with nuclear weapons.
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  216. Saudi Arabia makes the rounds at arms sale conferences. They don't consider themselves bound to US arms, and there's many sellers who don't mind the large amounts Saudi Arabia is willing to spend. I'm not sure how the USA would be able to guarantee that Israel has a technological edge in the future.
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  217. From what I understand of the last years, both you and Hezbollah have tried to not repeat the last invasion. There are skirmishes but an "acceptable" level of skirmishes for the actors. When Hezbollah show some discrimination with their rockets, you do the same with retaliatory bombings. During conflicts you can think of "ground to give". If the territory I take is territory you can afford to lose I have won less than what colour splotches on a simple map means. And if you still have more territory you can fight from, I will have to stretch further to take that. I'm always suspicious of every new generation who claims the pure air war is finally here.
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  218.  @rocksmo3384  One of the treaties from the War specifies that Åland, a little island outside Finland, will be demilitarized. But everyone knows that the place could be garrisoned in a short while.
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  219. Shirvan used "The USA does not lose wars, it loses interest" to sum that up in a previous video.
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  220.  @DavidTMSN  The british colonial administrations in general. A lot of them were starting to slip after the war as well when the european powers weren't in shape to enforce much. If there is a border that looks like someone with a ruler just drew a line it's likely the work of a colonial administration.
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  221. What happens in continental USA just looks uninteresting for these guys. The big thing for the taliban is territorial control of Afghanistan. They are still twats but they are not global-reach twats. al-Qaeda is more global in their goals. They start taking a dislike to the US presence in Saudi Arabia and other places. They are more pan-islamist, and want everyone to be part of the great big islamist community they're the chosen vanguard for. I'd say the USA had a legit casus belli against those guys. A bunch of groups can then use al-Qaeda as a sort of franchise. You put their logo on your stuff, swear to the al-Qaeda hierarchy and get their support. Then you can keep doing your own thing on the side. Sometimes al-Qaeda takes a dislike to one of these branches.
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  222. The factionalism makes it complicated. The USA negotiated with a certain group of taliban, the ones who worked out of the taliban not-embassy in Doha, Qatar. These guys are not necessarily in control of all taliban factions.
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  223. I'm much more interested in what the neighbouring regional powers want to do with Afghanistan. Iran, Russia, China, India etc. They can't decide to pull out when they're right next to the whole thing.
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  224. @Kal17 China, Russia, India, Pakistan and the other neighbouring powers can't really decide to go home from their own region. All of them have to work out what relation they want with the taliban. It's a similar situation to before, Afghanistan is a centralized nation where control of Kabul doesn't mean control of the rest. China has their own separatist groups who might start to filter back and forth over the border. Russia and China are among the powers who still have embassies in Kabul, I think. Parts of the pakistani state still support them. I haven't checked how the relations between China and the taliban progresses. Usually China wants resource concessions and port infrastructure, and doesn't care how you run your people. I don't know why China would want to replace the taliban, and why the taliban would want to expand a war into China.
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  225.  @erwanmarie8756  I think history nerds never got invited to conferences with the great powers. They were only allowed in afterwards to justify the decisions. They had a better understanding that history always weigh far less than the power balance. And they always figured that the balance could change, that the outcome of the last war would last only until the next war. I always think the UK colonial administration as a mix of a few enthusiast adventurers touring around and a lot of public school idiots who filled out the posts.
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  226.  @gvibration1  I don't know. The Reformation here meant tyranny by the crown and religous oppression.
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  227. We don't really have any examples yet of how conflict between two great powers using the latest in mechanized warfare would look like compared to the low-intensity conflicts around the world.
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  228.  Harry Paul  "What is the Vietcong/North Vietnam?" is something that seems to baffle the US command. The US leadership of the time seems to think north Vietnam is a proxy of the soviets, and keep making attempts to reach out to them instead of going to the north. South Vietnam is a functional state at the start. It's an autocratic place ruled by this catholic-vietnamese family. They get the idea to ban buddhism at some point early on, huge protests happen, the USA deposes and replaces them and South Vietnam gets a string of military commanders under the USA. If the USA thinks the government in North Vietnam is irrelevant, they treat the south similarly. No one from the south is present when people like Kissinger or the joint chiefs discuss strategy in Vietnam. The ARVN is pretty functional. They keep contributing manpower during the conflict. They manage to hold South Vietnam themselves for a few years until the US material support and payouts stop, while the north keeps getting theirs.
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  229.  @blyat4024  1960 is when the world powers are still figuring out how to work around the presence of nuclear weapons. It changes how the UN forces in Korea or the advisors in Vietnam can work around eachother. There was people who thought that a conventional invasion of North Vietnam would be a more direct solution. Not a genocide solution, but one where the place is forcibly unified under South Vietnam. The conflict is a civil war between different vietnamese factions at heart. Someone like Moltke or Clausewitz would argue that lengthy war is worse. The longer the war goes on, the more it disrupts the normal lives of people.
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  230.  @Faris-bk6xu  Right now I have to think of Russia as an aggressive regional power. It is very far from the Cold War visions of massive nuclear-supported mechanized warfare across Europe.
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  231.  @Josian-ps7fb  They are not neighbours with Russia. The French left has their own issues with NATO, I think. But not to the point of taking Russian bank loans.
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  232. Well, this is the second run at an attempt to run a taliban central government. It still has the same weaknesses as before the US invasion and everyone involved knows it.
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  233. Right at the moment, no. It's a sort of localized proxy conflict in Gaza. It could definitely become a regional war the more the actors improvise.
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  234. I'm curious what the geopolitics of uranium and other fissile materials look like. And the other necessities of nuclear power, like a steady supply of cooling water. The nearest historical events I can think of is the early large-scale adaptation of oil and how it changed oil-rich regions. Like how Saudi Arabia went from a place most known for being next to the Suez Canal to an international economic powerhouse.
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  235. It's the kind of place where shore-based naval artillery and robots have a part to play. If you don't have any cruisers, but a nice bit of shore where you can station firepower equivalent to a cruiser.
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  236. A sleeper cell of who?
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  237.  @Mer1912  To the european great powers around 1880, these kinds of conventions only last until the next war. They saw the world as a balance of power, where history nerds are only allowed in afterwards to justify the result. The next war would produce new conventions.
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  238. ​ @l.h.tnguyen4916 I think the important question is what the USA would like in place of the guardian council. There is a lot of Iranian exiles, some with government in exile ambitions.
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  239.  @l.h.tnguyen4916  I think the USA is in such a position of strength that it can intervene and withdraw at will. It has a bonkers ambition to fight at least two major interventions simultaneously. I think a decades-long occupation of Iran would be impopular unless a replacement government came to be. There are several Iranian exiles with ambitions.
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  240.  @Narekz  Yeah, that's what I think too. The last rounds of protests started in a corner of the country but were not limited by ethnicity.
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  241.  @codyvandal2860  Chinese railroad workers at least. A whole bunch of them was present.
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  242.  @ymtzlgn  Are Jews a single ethnicity? Including Jews migrating from the collapsing Soviet states, Jews from Manhattan and Jews from Lebanon?
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  243.  @soniahemmati2372  I'm also not sure the Iranian state uses all faith to hold Iran together. I thought they tuned up the state enemy of the day.
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  244.  @codyvandal2860  1790 is a much smaller USA in between other colonies.
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  245.  @codyvandal2860  The USA could have remained a small number of colonies hugging the coast I guess. With nothing but brits.
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  246.  @codyvandal2860  Do you think "Europe" is a single ethnicity?
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  247.  @codyvandal2860  Like there wasn't a time when italians and Jews and Irish and Germans were not the migrant wave at the bottom living in a slum and doing the crap jobs.
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  248.  @thecomment9489  I think the DPRK isn't looking to start any conflict. Their government see nukes primarily as a guarantee against outside regime change. And they think they need a DPRK bomb instead of Chinese guarantees.
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  249.  @conflictedthought1  Yeah, that seems to be the attitude in South Korea. The DPRK does it decade after decade.
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  250.  @kuniver8proof  I don't think the PRC likes a nuclear Korea. They don't like everything the DPRK stirs up.
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  251.  @batboy555  Ukraine is an example of nuclear powers not immediately escalating to nukes. The Russian arsenal is not used in tactical goals. I think they use it to deter NATO.
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  252.  @mEmory______  I think China is the big, arrogant regional power to most of these South East Asian smaller states at the moment.
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  253. There can traditionally be a hawk-dove angle. You could find hawks in both the US parties, for example.
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  254. What counts as a bad job for a mercenary? Stuff that is too risky or unpaid or some other reason to refuse?
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  255. There is a bit of a brain drain in Iran. There is quality education in Iran, but having a quality education also gives someone more opportunity to leave Iran.
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  256. The rest of the EU and NATO seems like they'd rather not have the Cyprus conflict on their hands.
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  257.  @firasajoury7813  Right now, I think the turkish economy is the greatest threat to turkish ability to project power around the Mediterranean and the gulf states.
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  258.  @asmo1313  It looks like the old soviet doctrine for urban sieges, where they shell everything and then move forward slowly. And that doctrine is a lot better at killing civvies and creating rubble.
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  259.  @rushyscoper1651  There is a number of different kurd group. But they are effectively regional autonomists with either a military wing, a political wing or both. Militant kurd groups have fought uprisings against Saddam, al-Assad, the Turkish state etc. The Turkish state consider them terrorists. The current Iraqi state was negotiating with the Kurd Region in '19, and they have fairly stable relations with Turkey. al-Assad would probably like to retake control of all Syrian territory including Rojava, if there wasn't a few other threats. But that is still ongoing.
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  260.  @rushyscoper1651  The US presence in there is largely symbolic at this point.
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  261.  @rushyscoper1651  The US presence inside Syria itself is small. Effectively holding a part of Syrian airspace makes a lot of difference. The Russian presence also seemed to rely on local Syrians. Turkey has their own Syrian proxy rebels and/or mercenaries in their buffer zone.
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  262. I think the armed forces have to un-learn a lot of things from Afghanistan.
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  263.  @futuredisaster-k5l  Most nation-states have to think foremost of other nation-states. Not whatever happens on the periphery. I think any and all insurgency movements try to reach the point of statehood. No one wants to permanently live the guerilla life.
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  264. Turkey has an upcoming election in 2023. The more Erdogan can prolong and divert attention to Turkey's role on the world stage, the less he has to talk about his ideas for the turkish inflation. Erdogan's idea has been to lower interest rates to fight inflation, not the other way around. YPG/PYD has a lot more hard support from other NATO nations, who doesn't share the war goals of Turkey in the Syrian conflict.
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  265.  @Lestibournes  Fatah definitely want to preserve their own power over the Palestinian Authority, and not get couped by Hamas and other factions. Fatah today has managed to get more recognition from Israel and the USA. The controversies about the Oslo accord was pretty strong at the time, and led up to his assassination.
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  266.  @Lestibournes  The plan right now seems to keep shoving them into refugee camps in Lebanon until that place collapses.
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  267.  @Tunahater  The peace process hasn't been moving for decades now. Parts of the current israeli government has talked about annexing land and evicting some millions of people for years now. I think the hawks in Israel would rather not discuss that this happened on their watch.
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  268.  @savioblanc  I know there was low-intensity violence there, but not on a scale that would demand an increased IDF presence. More like the scale of an idiot with a knife than an armed group. It always seems like the settlers shout the loudest that they need more IDF services than anyone else, and are way too happy to shove an IDF conscript in front of them any time there's low-intensity violence. It's still an ongoing situation but I think more details should start to become clear. Israel's position is that all official inquiry will have to wait. Netanyahu's official position is that it can't be his fault.
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  269.  @RUTHLESSambition5  Any time we've wargamed an invasion of stateside USA, we fail to deal with the raw logistics of maintaining an occupational force from Vladivostok, Japan or France. Right now I don't see how states like Canada, Mexico, Brazil etc could mount one. Early on in its history, the USA was a lot smaller.
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  270. What else is there, Jordan? Palestinians have been allowed there for a while but that's also not a very wealthy place.
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  271. I think Leave could have functioned, except the Leave side had 2-4 definitions of it, sometimes running parallell campaigns. These campaigns pushed things ahead until events caught up. The City of London is still why I fear moments when finance starts to believe they are the primary economic engine and start to bloat.
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  272.  @rashnuofthegoldenscales4512  I don't think breaking up Iran is feasible.
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  273. It looks like how any old banana republic or raw material dictatorship works. When the government makes money from a handful of cash crops and raw materials like mineral wealth or oil. The subjects can be starving, but the government still runs as an export port and a road to the mine works. The shakiest part for these places is when the world market price for their raw material of choice shifts.
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  274. And because bombs are far less useful than people think. Every generation someone proclaims that the tool for the pure air war is here, and then this new tool fails to take and hold territory. From what I understood of Netanyahu, he was in the anti-ground invasion camp a few weeks ago. And has maintained a doctrine of supporting territorial authorities instead of IDF patrols.
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  275.  @msdfsdfe2533  The settler groups tries to have their own militias, but likes to run and hide behind the IDF and shove some 19 year old conscript in front of them when it gets too tough.
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  276. No empire wants to redirect their entire force to counter skirmishes in the periphery. Not when other nation-states are still there.
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  277. The USA can show up into a lot of regional wars, being a global superpower and all. Trying to anticipate who the USA favors and how long their interest will remain is something all regional actors have to do I think.
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  278.  @lale5767  Personally, I think their armed forces is set up so no part of the royal family can coup eachother easily. A palace coup is about the only threat left to the crown.
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  279. Current Chechnya is an example of what tolerated regional autonomy could look like in Russia. A local strongman or warlord allied with Moscow who enables the central state and russian companies to operate and being allowed to exert local authority. I think a fractured Russia would have a lot more of these blokes, locals who find a balance between a weak central state and autonomy without fully challenging the central authority by going full separatists.
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  280. Geopolitics blokes tend to look at industry and logistics with the same weight as military minutiae.
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  281.  @0Tzahi0  I think that's something pure geopolitics nerds miss, because they want to get to what they think is the hard underlying strengths. Three dudes is nothing but a distraction in the total wars of Europe. From what I understand now, Hamas usually traded them. They're valuable to exchange for other prisoners or for some other perk or benefit.
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  282.  @0Tzahi0  How often does Hamas kidnap people? IDF troops and not.
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  283.  @0Tzahi0  I knew they had prefered to exchange people when they did it the last time. How often have they exchanged captured soldiers and kidnapped civilians?
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  284. Right now I'm no longer sure what high spending itself does. Saudi Arabia spends tons and fumbles in Yemen. I'm not sure how much of the US spending is part economic stimulus.
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  285. I don't know that they have any interest in this. They want to uphold the al-Assad government and they want at least a few friendly mediterranean ports.
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  286. It's always nice to hear perspectives from the locals. I'm curious what the taliban think about their other neighbouring powers. India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Iran etc.
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  287. If it's anywhere close to the wars of Europe, lots of wars end with large piles of arms laying around and not enough people to control what happens with them on the second-hand market.
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  288. The USA had a round of budget debates in the armed forces immediately following the end of WW II and the demobilization. The argument of the Air Force was that the Air Force was the branch that could fight a nuclear war, and therefore the only necessary one. This changed when the need for army troops and conventional warfare remained in Korea, Germany, Vietnam etc and the USA needed a more flexible option than only nukes. But there was a period where the army tried to keep up and launch the "pentomic army" that would train to fight through a nuclear barrage.
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  289. I think that if the religious guardian council was warped to another planet overnight, the republican guard corps would remain a fully functional secular military dictatorship.
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  290.  @Th1sIsMyLegacy  UNHCR says that the vast majority of ukrainians are still moving in short steps, into Poland or Germany or living as internal refugees. A smaller amount make it across Europe. A lot of ukrainians were already working in Poland.
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  291. No one likes to be next to a collapsed or failed state.
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  292. I think there was always 2-3 parallell Leave camps, each convinced it was the natural true version people wanted. Some bits were hard. Did anyone believe Norway and Iceland would suddenly accept British fishing.
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  293. I want to see how much the IDF can turn into an internal security force and still balance external defence. Those are very different roles.
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  294.  @Mfhollander2  I think that was part of the criticism against the IDF. The settlers were shouting the loudest for ever more IDF service, and got IDF units to hang around and watch West Bank farmers.
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  295. I think the Russian strategic rocket forces, their nuclear arsenal, does exactly the job it needs to do. It deters a NATO intervention. Kreml has very flexible lines, and NATO tests them. But they have not yet tested direct intervention. It's a bit like asking why Vietnam or Korea or Afghanistan did not see nuclear use.
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  296.  @dave23720  Bits like what weapons systems can be sent and how Ukrainians can be trained. I think a NATO no fly zone is thoroughly off the table at least.
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  297. When I try to understand why the ISI and Pakistan does something, I try to figure in their relations with others in the region. The russians, their conflict with India etc.
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  298. It leaves me with other questions. Do we just let Saudi Arabia get off?
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  299.  @ccaa7674  I have higher hopes for a general strike or the Iranian oppositionals in exile than for an ethnic separatist group to spring up. Last time there was anti-regime riots they sparked in a corner of the country. But they didn't seem to be ethnic riots, instead it was outrage that the morality police has killed people.
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  300. Part of that seems to be a false safety in technical surveillance. For all the bluster from the government, the israeli intelligence services rely a lot on local partners like Fatah and its own security services or other informants. That's been unavailable in Gaza for a long while.
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  301.  @abraham2172  It's not a lack of information, but a torrent of information. Like a stream of snippets and smaller stories that gets hard to navigate. The underreported part right now is the West Bank. There was no attack from there but the settler movement seems intent on stirring up trouble and really showing why Israel needs a two-front war. The IDF is arresting Hamas members, sympathizers and associates. There's growing demonstrations among the palestinians on the West Bank.
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  302. I'm interested in the future of the Arctic. Could Murmansk be supplied by sea, and how would NATO nations like Norway build naval power there.
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  303. A large bulk of mercenary work we've found, historically, has been training, logistics etc. Some nation wanting a quick army still needs to hire people for the motor pool.
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  304. Hydroelectrics are a local geographical feature of Scandinavia. It depends on a few things. There is a geographical hard limit on how many large rivers there are, and environmental limits on how many can be exploited without cutting into the wildlife. How much rainfall there is affects how much water gets stored in the system to be released. Emergency power was always oil. There was emergency oil plants here and there.
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  305.  @TheDentedHelmet  Sweden produces a lot of logging industry and industrial machinery. Not necessarily stuff the consumers immediately see on a shelf.
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  306.  @scatalin09  Yeah, Scandinavia's population is traditionally concentrated in a few agrarian regions. The Netherlands is a lot more population-dense, too.
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  307.  @nexeos  I think of "Tel Aviv" as the secular segment of the israeli voters, who have been out of power for some decade now.
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  308.  @nexeos  Right now I'm more worried Israel might move closer to its neighbours, like the turkish definitions of democracy and what it means to be a religious society.
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  309.  @nexeos  From what I understand, Israel operates on a separate government and war cabinet at the moment. Netanyahu has postponed the changes to the almost-constitution. His supporting parties have not relented in their demands.
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  310. It sounds like a system built for the russian corruption. The people with resources and status who benefit most from corruption would keep out, and people who can't do much against the state will carry the burdens.
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  311.  @abandonedchannel281  Pan-arabism or nasserism? I think the soviets tried to support that stuff for a while. Along with the b'aath parties around the region.
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  312.  @ericferguson9989  It depends. al-Qaeda had ideals of some sort of international muslim brotherhood. If all their little franchise branches believed in that fully is another question. Young Turks are nationalists. They want to build up a strong nation-state first and foremost, one that can keep up with other modern nation-states.
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  313.  @danmorgan3685  Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, that itself makes them a bunch of twats. When the crown prince speaks of reforms now, he doesn't mean reform of the crown itself. Just enough so they can have investors and diversify their economy. And keep arming up for some reason, they are picking up weapons like crazy. As things are right now, any change to the oil price can shake them up.
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  314. A lot of the better organised groups in the region still rely on trusted low-tech solutions like cell structures and local organisation. The Muslim Brotherhood was able to function without twitter.
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  315.  @faxmachine5306  I think the afghan federal government opposed a lot of that process. They figured just how reliant they were on NATO support. One of my friends mentioned the old soviet puppet government who stood at least a few years after the soviet withdrawal as soviet support lingered.
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  316.  @GeneralGrievousCIS  When I have looked at military units pressed into non-military roles in other parts of the world, like the soviet/russian tradition of internal troops or gendarmerie/guardia civil units, they reshape into that role. Units used as SWAT cops start to become that, units used as internal riot suppressors do that instead. The soviet tradition of internal troops was to provide uprising suppression and coup defence, and at most a security role in a hot war. I'm worried Israel would start to become something closer to their neighbours. Either by pushing towards the turkish definition of democracy where elections are held but the president gets harder and harder to remove. Or an armed force that is more internal security force than external defence. It's not as bad as the saudi armed forces who are spending a ton on something that's mostly glorified coup defence and can't coordinate itself in Yemen..
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  317. The party tends to disliked it when their clients start stuff. Their vision has been decades on decades of building up China without anyone rocking the boat.
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  318.  @wellhellothere-v1h  I don't think China has some grand alliance either. They have transactional relations with partners. They would still like this transactional relation to be so one-sided that others are effectively clients. The PRC itself thinks it has to build up for decades more at best until it can match the USA. It wants free reign over internal matters, and tend to define regional ambitions as "internal matters". Like every Chinese in Thailand is an internal matter, the South China Sea is an internal matter...
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  319.  @amanverma7033  Could Afghanistan and the taliban do that? I thought they were busy consolidating their hold on Afghanistan itself. With a lot of the same problems the old government (and the first round of taliban government) had. A weak, centralized state that effectively ends outside Kabul and a few regional cities.
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  320. @Abdullah Mohamed What's the core of the peace deal? All I know is that the afghan government and the clans or tribes that doesn't support it (including the taliban) have made attempts at it for years. It looks a lot like how wars typically end. A war does not end by going down and beating every single b'aath party member, prussian or baptist. You move on to a treaty. Personally I think it's just the USA being weird about how war works.
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  321. It's not like the USA has a drone monopoly in the world right now? I don't know how the USA would react to an unidentified drone strike on the Green Zone in Bagdad.
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  322.  @ihl0700677525  The US doctrine is to keep a capacity to keep two fronts or regional interventions going simultanously. But US divisions in Iraq wouldn't be available in Europe or the Pacific. The saudis are not exclusive buyers. They are making the tour around the world's arms faires. But there's a lot more people who think Iran is more important right now, and willing to overlook older conflicts.
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  323.  @ihl0700677525  Russia today still doesn't compare to how we saw the Soviet Union. They've been more about testing smaller, cheaper stuff. NATO article 5 won't trigger if the computer system of a small national bank fails. It's still more of a regional threat, there is a string of eastern NATO nations who would prefer to remain in NATO, and a few who could tip in either direction. The economy of Russia is smaller than Italy. The US criticism in there is usually that too many of these involve an "and then the USA intervenes" element. Which is shrinking as the US partners arm up, but still there. How many folks in the region around China actually count as allies? It sounds like they are much better at pushing their weight than making friends with anyone, internally and externally.
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  324.  @egyptiandefender9232  From what I could tell, Egypt would rather not have a humanitarian disaster pushed on them by Israel. I have no idea where the israeli ultranationalist imagine that the inhabitants of Gaza or the West Bank will actually go. The israeli government doesn't really feel like governing them, and leaves it to the various territorial authorities. I thought the egyptian military weren't very keen on Hamas. Israel can blockade the territorial waters outside Gaza and the land routes into Israel, but not the land border with Egypt. And Egypt has had an interest in keeping Hamas from moving across too much. In Saudi Arabia there's a similar popular opinion, but the crown prince in an absolute monarchy needs to care less about that. The crown prince could approach Israel as much as he wanted to. I don't know what al-Sisi and the army thinks right now.
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  325.  @ymtzlgn  From the EU perspective, you could notice what Netanyahu cared most about. Anyone willing to use the veto all EU governments have to block measures against Israel. The diaspora was always secondary. The other idea I have seen tossed around is a UN protectorate. Kosovo after the war was one for almost a decade. Which still in practice means UN troops from Egypt, Jordan etc. There is the other palestinian territorial authority as well, Fatah. Who still wants increased security against settlers on the West Bank. Egypt is not very keen on ruling the place either, or having half a million people shover over the border. I don't think any neighbours would be happy with a solution where Israel shoves refugee administration onto them.
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  326. Depends on what you want to do with the military. If I want a military that does nothing but sit around for territorial defence with the close region as its main scope, a conscript reserve force is pretty cheap. You can adjust their level of training and how many are in active service rotation at any given time upward if you have the money for it. But the cheap part is that they support themselves on their civilian day job for most of the time. Paying a bunch of contract soldiers full-time wages to do the same thing gives you less guys for the same money.
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  327. I think the russian nuclear devices do their job right now. They guarantee a continued NATO non-intervention in Ukraine. Not peace, but the freedom of action of Russia. They deter a regime change from abroad.
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  328. ​ @ihl0700677525 As a rule, the existing members of the nuclear club like it to be exclusive. Including keeping their allies nuclear-free. I think the DPRK nuclear program says something about how much the DPRK wants to rely on a Chinese nuclear umbrella. DPRK views them as a deterrent to outside regime change, and as an additional saber-rattling during other negotiations.
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  329.  @yahyamohammed637  That's the position of Iran, from what I understand. The EU was more positive, but a treaty with only the EU and Iran would not do much.
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  330.  @maquacr7014  More like the EU can't do a lot if the USA suddenly decides it will be hardline on Iran for a few decades.
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  331.  @maquacr7014  The EU is like a consensus government where each national government can easily veto something. The EU having a joint foreign policy at all is relatively new. I think Iran wanted US sanctions lifted as well.
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  332. That's a good thing to remember about mercenaries. It can range all the way from a former elite soldier to militia dudes who plant a roadside bomb for cash.
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  333.  @hazb8026  Yeah, it's a good example of what an intense trade conflict inside the EU could look like.
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  334. There's plenty of others who can detail what a US carrier group can do. There's been few hot conflicts with carriers though, only exercises and wargames of how a carrier on carrier duel could be. The actors who can build carriers still do so, the USA keeps making more and China tries as well. The ones who still have carriers have not scrapped them, even if France isn't announcing any new ones.
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  335.  @pugilist102  I think it's just a continuous line of men flailing forward.
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  336. @kira I know, they didn't stay in the former satellite states.
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