>It works great, until the rest of the world decides that it wants to cut out the middleman.
Isn't this why the US invests in having the world's biggest military by a long margin, plus the world's most powerful spy agencies? To make sure nobody dares cut them out of their privileged position otherwise they get a dose full of aircraft carriers, F-35 and B-2s after the NSA finds out what their plans is from the spyware they put in their iPhone.
Yes, exactly.
The challenge - alluded to in the article - is that having a functional military requires a domestic manufacturing base and machine tool industry. The U.S. generally tries to keep its arms manufacturing in-house, for obvious national security reasons. But even if you've kept the existing defense contractors alive, you lose out on the ability to repurpose the country's civilian manufacturing base if it doesn't exist. This was pretty critical in WW2: General Motors made more TBM Avengers than Grumman, Chrysler made more tanks than all German manufacturers combined, Kaiser made Liberty Ships by the hundreds. Without the ability to quickly tool up, you'll end up defeated in any war of attrition.
There's a pretty significant risk that we'll find out that the U.S. is a paper tiger if it comes to any sort of prolonged war with a near-peer power.
>Without the ability to quickly tool up, you'll end up defeated in any war of attrition.
Why is this a risk? The biggest tool makers in the world are Germany and Japan which are in the US sphere of influence whether they want to or not and are therefore incentivized to sell to the US as many machines it would need to fight a war.
The risk for Japan or Germany not wanting to sell tools to the US feels insignificant, as they aren't in a position of power to refuse to play ball.
Japan and Germany are entirely metric. Pretty much the entire US manufacturing industry, or rather the zombie the pentagon keeps on life support, is in US standard.
That means everything needs to be adjusted or replaced. That's not viable in peace times, it's even less so in times of war.
Obviously this applies primarily to tanks and ships, not planes nor guns.
Part of the beauty of eg. CNC mills is they don't necessarily care what the units are.
Especially when inch is now defined as being exactly 25.4 mm and you can manufacture to 0.01mm with commodity-level hardware.
Japan and Germany are vulnerable to Chinese aggression. The primary reason why a declining company like Micron was gifted a new fab in Syracuse NY is that their Boise fab is within range of a larger portion of the Chinese arsenal.
That's why (well, one reason why) the U.S. keeps Japan and Germany in its sphere of influence. Same for Saudi Arabia (major oil producer) and Taiwan (major chip producer). Notice that U.S. / Saudi relations soured a fair bit after the U.S. became the largest global oil producer again (thanks to fracking and shale oil). We're a bit less willing to overlook an authoritarian dictatorship when we don't need them.
The challenge with all international relationships is that they're not stable. Germany almost didn't back us on Ukraine, for example, because Russia threatened to cut off the supply of natural gas and make its citizens freeze in the winter of 2022/2023. Only because the NordStream pipeline blew up anyway (an act of sabotage that American journalists have attributed to the U.S.) and the U.S. secured alternate sources of heating for Germany did they back us on Ukraine. Had it been a different regime in power in either the U.S. or Germany, that could've turned out very differently.
But the lack of cheap gas fucked up a small but important part of the german industry: chemical commons. That cripples the economic competitiveness and together with other negative developments, e.g. the change to EVs, will result in very hard times for the Germans.
In consequence the right party is rising, in eastern Germany to an already serious level.
You will see where this way goes.
It appears the western public's understanding of geopolitical realities is always a decade behind. _Right now_, all of NATO combined can't even outproduce Russia alone. We don't need to be talking hypotheticals, it is literally happening in real time.
plus if a conflict like that occurs then clearly the US has lost significant power. so why would it be a given that American neo-colonies stay on its side?
>_Right now_, all of NATO combined can't even outproduce Russia alone.
What? Don't know where you're getting your sources but NATO combined definitely can outproduce Russia. Why it isn't, is that Russia is in war mobilization mode with all their industry running 3 shifts for the war effort, while NATO's industry is still in peace-time mode because they're not under attack.
NATO countries can overproduce Russia in a future, but right now they don't.
> with all their industry running 3 shifts for the war effort
Lol? Where are you getting your sources?
Perun
Putin and Chemezov themselves?
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/01/02/russian-defense-ch...
Military != 'all their industry'
That’s interesting . Sounds like it will end badly.
I do think the next major war will be nuclear and not one of attrition. America is not going to fight a traditional war it can’t win.
I'm not sure, honestly. I certainly think it's a risk that the next big war starts, it goes poorly for America, and then we resort to nuclear weapons to squeeze out "victory" (i.e. everybody dies) if we're all going to die anyway.
But I think there's another possibility that most people aren't considering: disintegration. It's very common for countries to cease to exist as countries when they start losing a war, particularly a war that happens because they're moribund and falling apart internally anyway. Witness the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires in WW1; the end of the Roman empire; England during the War of the Roses in the aftermath of the Hundred Years War; Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in the wake of the Cold War; etc. This also doesn't have to wait until the end of the conflict: most of the big disintegrations in WW1 happened in 1917, before the armistice, and sometimes even to "victorious" parties.
Modern nuclear weapons are very tightly controlled with PALs, so that you physically can't arm them without correct codes produced by the Pentagon/NSA bureaucracy. If that bureaucracy falls apart, it's likely they will just rot in their silos, while humanity dukes it out with relatively primitive technology because nobody wants to work together anymore.
I heard this was the real reason the US took out Saddam Hussein. Basically, Saddam had been saying for years that he wanted Iraq to abandon the dollar for trading its oil. If he was successful at this, other Arab Nations would most likely do the same. This wasn't acceptable to the powers in the US, so the US tax payers funded the war in Iraq to send a message to other nations: Don't even think of abandoning the dollar.
Not sure if there's any truth to that at all, but it's at least believable.
According to George W. Bush, God himself told him to start the war.
Conspirology at its best. Better swap Saddam for Qaddafi, that would be even more believable.
First Iran-Iraqi war that resulted in a standstill, then invasion of Kuwait, and only then the second Iraqi war when he went totally nuts.
Other Arab nations are Saudis and Persian Gulf emirates, who had zero use for the deranged person. And were and still are quite happy with dollars.
https://www.wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/6528
> Qaddafi's government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver. During late March, 2011 these stocks were moved to SABHA (south west in the direction of the Libyan border with Niger and Chad); taken from the vaults of the Libyan Central Bank in Tripoli. This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French.franc (CFA).
> French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy's decision to commit France to the attack on Libya.