
loke wrote:MAD means "Mutually Assured Destruction" -- not "Agreed"
I meant the Mutually part of the moniker.
Of course one may hope that even after escalation to tactical nuke, one may hope that it does not escalate further -- however I am not that optimistic -- also keep in mind that when one party start to feel that it may be losing, the level of desperation will increase, and the probability of sending off more nukes will increase dramatically. What is there to lose? If they don't send off the nukes now then the foe will probably disable the nukes. Also, since we are losing we must use whatever tools left to crush the enemy = send off all the IBMCs still functional.
Why wait for the enemy to crush you, if you may have a chance to crush the enemy first? Seems illogical to do nothing if the enemy is about to crush you... So to avoid a nuclear winter the US should not be too aggressive in a potential future conflict with China/Russia -- to make sure they don't become desperate and fire off all the nukes they got, while they are still functional... sounds like a recipe for disaster to me...
Of course it does. We'll give Russia Sweden, and China Japan so as to not be "too aggressive" if fighting starts. We ask that Sweden capitulate completely so as not to anger the Nuclear gods. One can't be too cautious these days. We wouldn't want anyone to get hurt, this is war after all.
What do you want? we are pursuing conventional arms to the point where we are fielding hundreds of fighters that can take off a multitude of ships and even a barren road, we are working on every conventional option that we possible can. including the ones people think are of limited (or even no) tactical value in the F-35B.
It will go nuclear!
Well probably not, but if it did this is whats likely to happen, and conventional forces always matter
It will go nuclear anyway! Fight them, but just enough to win, and not so hard they go nuclear anyway!
ok sure, we will fight a very calm non-threatening global war were we don't push them too hard. just the right amount of massive global conflict
Irrelevant IMO -- this is not the early 1980s anymore, and China is not the USSR -- the question is, what tools and methods will the Chinese have available to locate and attack forward bases? The capabilities is developing very rapidly and is IMO already today above and beyond what the USSR had during the cold war. Imagine where they will be 10-15 years from now...
Imagine where we'll be 10 to 15 years from now.
and of course its Relevant Loke, Fanbase Gripen has made a really big deal of this shoot and scoot in the woods concept and the Norwegian neighbor has taken a lot of flak over having a centralized F-35 base. I'll take the pacific of over Scandinavia any day, especially considering the ranges involved and number of hiding locations.
sounds like the Gripen and the whole forward basing concept is even more useless then?
there is no perfect answer to any of this. A lot of people are going to die. You may well have a forward operating base with a half dozen F-35Bs get utterly destroyed, but we are also talking about possibly losing whole aircraft carriers too and we know that we are going to lose dozens of bases on day 1. Ironically the ones that don't get wasted might be the "less secure, less safe" F-35B bases.