Giled Pallaeon

@giledpallaeon

Military & International Affairs nerd. Defense professional. Mostly naval subjects, but all aspects of defense and natsec welcome. Oh, & plastic spaceships, that too. All opinions on all subjects my own #WeAreNAFO

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Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· 17d

Only one meme for it

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· 17d

Found my new “This you?” for far too many smug Europeans on this site (graphic reposted)

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· 17d

Betting against getting blocked

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· 18d

The PLAN has also recently begun fielding the Type 071 YUZHAO amphibious transport docks and Type 075 YUSHEN and 076 YULAN amphibious assault ships. These are clones of the most capable American amphibious warfare ships in most respects.

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· 18d

This is not the PLAN of today. The Type 055 RENHAI cruiser and Type 052D LUYANG III class destroyer are on par with almost anything fielded by any other navy, including the United States Navy. The RENHAI in particular is a powerful warship, well armed with excellent capabilities.

Type 055 RENHAI cruiser. Chinese sources will also call it a destroyer.

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· 18d

The PLAN’s amphibious forces were similarly ill-equipped, primarily composed of ships in the Type 079 (YULIAN) and Type 072 (YUKAN) landing ship families. These vessels were barely suitable for an invasion of Taiwan, let alone something further away.

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· 18d

In 1995 the most advanced surface combatants in PLAN service were the Type 051 (LUDA) and 052 (LUHU) destroyers. Even by the standards of the era these were obsolete warships unsuitable to fight a superpower navy or conduct extended out of area operations.

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· 18d

The other two options for global power projection are by air and by sea. By air requires long range transport aircraft and some way to enter theater safely. The US does it with allies. Except the PRC doesn’t have anyone worth the term ally, and their long range cargo plane (Y-20) first flew in 2013.

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· 21d

In that telling we are too weak-willed to end the world and not invested enough to fight through it. Ironically they are aware of how everyone else who has tried this has failed, and that we are the ones who invented MAD. Which makes them this meme very literally.

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· 29d

It’s dumber. GP, how could this possibly get dumber? He’s picked one of the candidates for most expensive yard to restart

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· Jul 11

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· Jun 23

But if that’s what you predicted when you saw this author byline (rewarmed Jeune Ecole wearing AI and dronez clothes), congrats, you can skip reading this and the attendant brain damage of trying to refute amounts to dogma among these idiots

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· Jun 23

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· Jun 18

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· Jun 14

Three hour build, solid kit. Systematic internal structure that seems like it learned from the Saturn V (whose kit dwarfs this one). Also an entertainingly incomplete selection of the expedition crew

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· Jun 7

Loudly seconded

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· May 21

Run up the colors

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· May 18

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· May 5

It’s almost like the point of militaries is to win wars, which is only distantly related at best to winning the peace afterwards, the job of other state agencies. I’m done now.

“This is because while the world’s major militaries have incredible tools for killing—or, in the words of the US military, “lethalitymaxxing”—they do not have effective tools for building or maintaining a lasting, productive peace. Strategic air bombing can win battles, but it does not win wars, and since the Vietnam War the US has demonstrated failure after failure in its efforts to rebuild a country after successfully toppling its government”

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· May 5

Oh, so you didn’t just tune out the post-WW2 unit but at least the WW1 unit too. And while it’s not especially likely it was brought up, many peer wars in the 18th and 19th century were also between major trading partners, just FYI. In other words, watch us.

“Another clear reason that any Cold War style rivalry between the US and China wouldn't neatly map on to the Cold War is that the US and Chinese economies are massively more intertwined than those of the US and the Soviet Union were. On the most basic level, whereas the US and USSR only traded, at maximum, about 1% of the total value of their country’s trade with each other, China is the US’s third most valuable trade partner. There is no way to separate the economies of the two countries without massive upheaval and suffering by millions, if not billions of people. The US and USSR could compete as different world systems because they were in different world systems. The US and China cannot do this.”

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· May 5

My sweet summer child. At a minimum, Brezhnev and Gorbachev exist to deflate this argument, on top of the PRC’s actual actions, rhetoric, and the unambiguous intent of the PLA buildup, not least of which the PLAN

“One is that China does not represent the same kind of threat to the US as the Soviets did. Though they are currently arming, China doesn't have the nuclear capabilities of the Soviets, nor the possibility for global military projection. China’s territorial and ideological ambitions are more limited than the Soviets were, and are focused on its immediate vicinity rather than a global communist revolution. China is interested in acquiring Taiwan and influencing the Korean peninsula, whereas the Soviets had continental, if not global ambitions. One can hardly imagine Xi Jinping standing on the world stage and proclaiming “We will bury you!” as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev famously did”

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· May 5

“The US entered these conflicts on the side of the status quo” is a truly amazing way to make “The US responded to aggression and invasion” sound bad (Cuba excepted).

“The Cold War conflicts the US did intervene in—Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Cuba, to name a few—were universally entered on the side of the status quo, despite the fact that none of the US’s allies in those conflicts were themselves democracies.”

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· May 5

As I was saying, because this definitely isn’t an exhaustive list of where the Soviets fucked around

“The rest of the world was divided up and fought over in a new imperialist push, which saw the US ally itself with murderous dictators and juntas from Chile to Myanmar, and with discriminatory regimes from South Africa to the American South. The Soviets did the same, allying with oppressive client states in Eastern Europe and, later, Cuba.”

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· May 5

Seconded, this article is remarkably bad. My mental jury is still out on whether I’d call the author a tankie, but he talks to far too many of them. Some examples: I’m sorry you didn’t pay attention in your HS history class, but this isn’t what I got *in a very conservative part of the South*

“Contrary to what your high school textbook and film franchises like “Rambo” and “Red Dawn” taught you, the Cold War was not primarily a conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. That’s what the US teaches because it frames the war as something the US won—the Soviets are gone, after all—and because it relegates most of the actual violence of the war to the status of sideshow or backdrop to the “real” story of the war, the superpower rivalry. This version of the Cold War is real and lethal, but limited to proxy wars conducted in places white people don’t live, with the occasional spy thriller thrown in to mix things up.”

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· May 5

Every now and again I’m reminded of the existence of this slide, which was supposedly part of a deck briefed to CDR INDOPACOM. Believe it or not, most of the rest of the deck was worse.

Slide, left half says “Keep Calm and Trust Me I’m Not an Engineer”. Right half says “Technical specifications determined by: 1. Arbitrarily define requirements 2. Ask for feedback from SMEs 3. Refine across 50+ interviews”

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· Apr 26

Alternatively (Director’s Cut only, the theatrical cut is amazingly bad)

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· Apr 23

To nights far later than they should have been, with friends better than we deserved

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· Apr 12

“The U.S. is unambiguously signaling ‘play on’ in conflict with Iran without meaningful changes to the theater MCM posture.” “That’s right, Bob. Now we turn to our futures desk for the look at what this will do to oil prices.” *camera cut*

Giled Pallaeon@giledpallaeon· Apr 10