Sunday Cutdown IV (12/24/2023)

Clearing my inbox of stories I want to document

1) Planning for one long hot war with China

CNN: US Air Force to reclaim Pacific airfield that launched atomic bombings as it looks to counter China

The US Air Force is bringing back the airfield used to launch the nuclear-bomb raids of Japan in World War II. The target this time around? China, of course.

The US Military has so convinced itself that a drawn-out conflict with China is plausible and likely enough that it needs to spread its bases and assets across as much of the Western Pacific as possible to avoid being crippled by initial (one assumes, surprise) Chinese attacks.

Tora! Tora! Tora! [but in Mandarin]

On the face of it, logical enough.

Framing it a bit more broadly, our military is positing that there will be direct Chinese strikes on US forces throughout the region, so much so that we have to give Beijing so many targets that we — I guess — ensure a conventional second-strike capability.

So, after the Chinese wipe out a bunch of our bases, killing US troops in the thousands, we’ll counter-launch against Chinese military bases and facilities, killing PLA troops in the thousands.

And, after that?

Once thousands are dead on both sides, we’re just going to … what exactly? Just keep doing it again and again conventionally or escalate to strategic strikes — to include nukes? Are we talking major cities and capitals? How do we prevent such escalation?

Details, my boy! Details!

The war games and planning that accompany these decisions should worry us all, primarily because they exist in this pretend world where two nuclear powers are going to comprehensively attack one another conventionally and somehow reach a satisfactory ending for both sides.

So we’re basically going to blow up the world over Taiwan. Make sense to you?

There is a reason why nuclear powers do not fight directly: it borders on the insane.

We should sell to Taiwan anything it wants. We should bolster non-nuclear regional allies with whatever they want. If and when China comes after Taiwan, we should backstop Taiwan but not get involved with directly taking on the Chinese.

That would be like the PLA fighting US troops directly seeking to invade Cuba.

Think about that one for a minute: If China was willing to do that over Cuba, how would we view them as a threat?

We should not be planning along these lines. It’s a waste of money. It’s unduly provocative. It’s a bad read on what is realistic in this world.

It is thinking about war solely within the context of war, which is incredibly dangerous and the occupational hazard of leaving wars to the generals and admirals.

That money is better spent on building the biggest and best drone military capabilities in the world, and then letting our allies use them when the time comes.

It’s not just about taking the man out of the loop.

It’s about taking nuclear war out of the loop.

2) Which historical example of proportionality do we choose?

WAPO: More than 20,000 dead in Gaza, a historic human toll

WAPO: How Israel pushed over a million Palestinians into a tiny corner of Gaza

The Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and took our colony Philippines. We lost about 25k all told in those two attacks.

Our response was to wage total war against the Japanese for years to the point of bombing their homeland with nuclear weapons. In all, we lost about 110k troops fighting Japan. Our civilian losses were in the single-digit thousands for the Pacific Theater

In all, Japan lost over three million people in WWII, roughly 2.5m troops and the better part of a million civilians.

So let’s just say we returned the favor to Japan at about 25-to-1 in terms of subsequent combat, and we countered our original 25k dead with a number vastly beyond (roughly 1200-to-1).

Point being there was no proportionality there. There was only the desire to completely eliminate Japan’s capacity to do anything like that again.

That was the most American of wars.

So when I hear Israel lost about 1,400 and now the Gaza count is roughly 14x that, I don’t look at it like Israel was supposed to call it all off once it hit 1,400 dead Palestinians — be they troops or civilians. That’s not how Western democracies wage war, in my understanding of history.

As for the story on Israel pushing all those Gazans into one tiny corner? Just more evidence that Israel plans on coming as close as it possibly can to eliminating the threat source that was Gaza.

We are viewing this conflict all wrong. Like it’s just some terrorist strike and Israel should respond proportionally.

Israel saw 7 Oct as an invasion by a military force committed to its complete destruction.

And so it is answering much like America did with Japan — with little-to-no regard for any sort of proportionality.

That’s what happens when you surprise-attack democracies. So don’t do it.

Or, if you must, then don’t complain about what comes next.

3) What kind of country works to keep immigrants from addressing key labor shortages

WAPO: A broken immigration system keeps workers out of jobs the U.S. needs to fill

Sort answer: a pretty stupid one.

Subtitle says it all:

North Dakota’s hospitals are desperate for nurses, but backlogs and other problems in immigration agencies block the way

Congress simply refused to act:

One more gut punch from a broken immigration system untouched by Congress for 33 years and largely operating on a framework dating to 1965.

If there was a way to impeach the entire Congress, I would support it.

4) I laughed until I cried

Hollywood Reporter: ‘Leave the World Behind’ Director Sam Esmail Explains His Controversial Ending

“Leave the World Behind” is a fun movie on Netflix. I watched it twice: great performances, empty scenario.

People may get jacked about how “scary” its scenario is, but I laughed it off in terms of plausibility.

[SPOILER ALERT:

The scenario is basically the worst version of what we conceived could happen with Y2K — just malevolently engineered by unknown forces (which I found implausible)]

In my opinion, it’s a weak-ass scenario to bolster what is basically a four-hand play about a White couple being forced to confront the apocalypse with a Black father-and-daughter combo. Those parts were interesting.

The Tesla bit was truly hilarious. I could almost feel Musk’s blood pressure rising somewhere on the planet.

But the overall movie was kind of weak: Just a series of discoveries of just how bad this whole thing is, with the underlying lesson being: people are shit and will treat each other like shit whenever, wherever they can. And man, when you stress them out with a multi-sided disaster, they will lose their shit — in minutes, I tell you.

Moreover, Americans are the worst of the shitty people on this planet.

That is the cynicism that pervades this movie. It’s not sophisticated or particularly enlightening. It’s just people freaking out — like children really.

That’s the movie.

And it’s so-called “controversial ending” is nothing more than leaving you, the audience, with that thought. It won’t get any better but only worse, so what’s the point of extending this movie further? Might as well have characters binge on some beloved sitcom while they can in their neighborhood doomsday bunker

But what is the consistent history of America when it is hit by disaster?

Frankly, it doesn’t look anything like this movie. Never has and never will.

This is nothing more than a movie cynically pulled from a novel cynically written. It tells me nothing about human nature nor America nor disasters in general.

It just tells me that the people involved in this production, to include the Obamas as exec producers, are just supremely cynical types.

5) Skin in the game

Politico: Germany puts its troops in the line of fire if Putin attacks NATO

Germany sending its NATO troops to the new Fulda Gap known as Lithuania (I visited there once back in 1985).

I like it.

You want some Germans? We’ll give you some Germans! Right on your border!

6) Say it with me: Mitigation now, adaptation forever!

NYT: What No One at COP28 Wanted to Say Out Loud: Prepare for 1.5 Degrees

Smart piece by the always smart-on-climate David Wallace-Wells.

The simple truth is, per America’s New Map, that climate change is baked into our future through most of the rest of this century. Mitigation being pursued now and in the future is mostly about what sort of planet we’ll settle into around 2100:

Most analysts predict a global peak in fossil fuel emissions at some point over the next decade, followed not by a decline but a long plateau — meaning that, every year for the foreseeable future, we would be doing roughly as much damage to the future of the planet’s climate as was done in recent years. The expected result: end-of-century warming between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius.

There’s your realism on climate change. That’s why I felt compelled to craft a US grand strategy in response.

8) Nice labor if you can exploit it

Reuters: India’s economy follows China to reach rapid take off

I’ve been saying for a while that we should all expect a plethora of news stories about how India is and will be the hot new property within globalization for the foreseeable future, in effect superseding China.

This piece just does a lovely job of comparing the two nations’ rise. It’s like those football stats that shows how Jordan Love is totally replicating Aaron Rodgers’ first year as starter.

And yeah, those articles piss off Rodgers just like these articles piss off Beijing.

Here’s the summary:

India’s economy and demographics resemble China’s between the late 1990s and early 2000s, indicating there could be two more decades of rapid sustained growth ahead as well as an enormous associated rise in energy use:

Real gross domestic product per capita at purchasing power parity had risen to $7,100 in 2022, a rate China first reached in 2007/08 (“World development indicators”, World Bank, 2023).

Median population age has increased but is still low at 27.9 years, which China reached in 1998 (“World population prospects”, United Nations Population Division, 2022).

Population growth averaged 1.1% per year over the 10 years from 2012 to 2022, similar to China’s over the ten years from 1988 to 1998 (“World population projects”, United Nations Population Division, 2022).

The share of the population living in urban areas is estimated to have reached 35% in 2022, a level reached in China around 2000 (“World urbanisation prospects”, United Nations Population Division, 2018).

Energy consumption reached 26 gigajoules per person in 2022, a rate China reached in the early 1990s (“Statistical review of world energy”, Energy Institute, 2023).

Total oil consumption climbed to 237 million metric tons in 2022, which China first reached in 2001 (“Statistical review of world energy”, Energy Institute, 2023).

Severe air pollution in Delhi and other major urban areas resembles China’s northern cities in the 1990s and 2000s, when pollution was estimated to cut life expectancy by up to five years.

[Man, I wish I could do bullets within a quote on Substack. Kind of annoying.]

So yeah, we’ve all seen this movie, so let’s stay real on the subject.

9) A lesson in demography and generations

Wired: A Demographic Time Bomb Is About to Hit the Beef Industry

Turns out most of the beef eaten in America is by 50-and-over Whites — especially men.

There as so many US industries out there facing this issue of an aging-out White (largely male) core audience:

• NFL

• NASCAR

• MAGA

• SNL

• Support for Israel

• Beef industry

• CEOs

• Non-craft beer industry

• White Christian Nationalism

• [help me out here with some more examples].

What do I take from all this angst (as a middle-age White male!)?

We had a good run, damn-it!

More pertinent lesson: demographic shifts from one generation to another can be hugely impactful, and I mean really reshaping the market — whatever we’re talking about.

Frankly, that makes me feel pretty darn good.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!