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It's been a top foreign policy issue for Russia going back to Gorbachev. We shrug and say "hey, come on in, you're a free country!" and Russia views it as an existential threat. Ukraine started talks to join NATO in the mid 00s. The question isn't whether NATO expansion makes Putin change his...

I think that a better statesman than Biden could have talked Putin out of his invasion while taking more significant actions to deter him during the 9 months he was building up his forces on the border + however long we had intel they were planning this. But Biden quite literally is incapable of...

Sorry, lots of back and forth. To summarize, I contend that: I think it's not really up for debate that Putin seeks to restore Russian hegemony in Eastern Europe in a 'multi-polar world' (his words in his national security policies going back to since he took office) Putin's decision to invade...

No, I didn't say that. I think it's highly unlikely that the British Royal United Services Institute and an interview with a Latvian-American professor of national strategy and policy who supports Baltic NATO membership are propaganda elements. None of this has to do with social media...

I have linked several independent articles and interviews with very credible non-Russian authors and individuals. That's not propaganda. To the extent that I'm critical of some decisions we have made: We don't get to vote or have any say over what Russia does, we only have influence over our...

I like how this author puts things in terms of inflection points: https://www.fpri.org/article/2024/05/baltic-states-nato/ The Russian national security strategies pre-2015 talked a lot about increasing cooperation with the US, but also highlighted the risk of NATO forces and military...

Could you please go back and quote me where I ever said that?

Eh. Maybe. Clearly Putin's desired end state is a rejuvenation of Russian hegemony. But to what extent he does that with a carrot vs. stick if we didn't admit former Soviet nations into NATO is debatable. If you're in Putin's shoes, you're certainly more willing to start conflict if you know...

Their influence is significantly more subdued than during the height of the Cold War.

"The risk" of what? Russia poses an almost negligible risk to attacking US homeland or imposing on our sovereignty unless provoked. It also poses almost no risk to imposing on the sovereignty of any Western Europe power. It currently has quit its campaign to spread Russian friendly governments...

It was postulated as a thought experiment. The bolded part illustrates my point when asking the question - there is almost zero domestic appetite to actually send the NATO brigade to lose young men and women fighting Russia over Eastern European territory. Problem is, some of them are now...

It's a far leap to get from "let's not enter into tangled military alliances with countries who have very little relevant combat power and common national interests with the US" to isolationism. Hell, some NATO members are active Russian counter-intelligence threats to the US, and they don't...

So we're at the point of calling it "Russian Propaganda" when a British defense and security think tank writes an academic analysis on Russia's motivators based on declassified data collected by MI6? Or did you just stop at the acronym rusi and assume the pub was Russian?

When I said "motivator," I meant "that was a big reason why Putin thought he could be successful." As in, a motivator for Hitler's invasion of Russia in 1941 was that he thought that he could topple the Soviet Army before it reconstituted after Stalin's purge. Like Putin, he was wrong. And like...

(Also migrated from thread on PRC) https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/01/14/ukraine-mixed-record-rights-cautious-hope-reform https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/ukraine-through-russias-eyes His discrimination against certain ethnicities in the Donbass reason was a big...

(moving to this thread to keep the other one on topic of PRC)... My post wasn't an endorsement of Trump's positions on foreign policy, simply explaining that they're not new nor completely out of left field. Flipping this around, what would it look like if we granted Ukraine its desire to join...

Tariff proposals are an economic sanction on China in different packaging so we don't insult Mr. Xi too much. This is because China has used US dollars to build up the second largest Navy in the world. They need to be viewed through a lens of national security and not economic theory. You can...

The GOP has held onto the Nixonian belief that there needs to be some semblance of a functioning relationship between post Soviet Russia and the US to ensure global security. They also believe it's possible to bargain and negotiate with Putin to achieve this goal. Zelenskyy also isn't the great...

I don't like attributing viewpoints to an amalgamous group. I think that the question isn't whether we support defense of Taiwan at all, but what that defense looks like with a Trump vs Harris presidency. Diplomatically and economically, I think that a Trump administration would be more...

I think that Mattis' sense of duty and obligation toward military / civil relations as a retired 4-star general trumps (pun intended) an emotional desire to get 15 minutes of fame out of his resignation as Secretary of Defense. Yeah, I also think that he could beat the charges... but why invite...

The principle that the US shouldn't enter into treaties that obligates itself to use force as a third party in a conflict between two other nations, and the criticism that the US tends to bear the majority of the military burden and cost in these agreements, is neither new nor isolationist...

There's the whole UCMJ Article 88 thing that I'm sure a certain spiteful former President would try to pursue if reelected.

There's a lot of emotion in your post. If leaders make decisions based on a childish 'but mom, he hit me first!' train of thought, they're usually going to make mistakes. We have a very recent example of conducting a regime change in Iraq due to Saddam's unwillingness to comply with UN...

Did you read the article? The author answers both of these questions way more clearly than I could.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/israel-winning? Focus on completing the main objective rather than expanding the war out of revenge. The key point being that Israel needs to maintain international legitimacy - not just with the US - in order to successfully restore a lasting non-Hamas...

Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, and he has a drastically different policy toward economics and China's relationships with the west than his predecessor. Then he changed the rules to make himself President for life and has consolidated power within the CCP to remove any potential opponents...

I don't know why you are bolding Hezbollah. I used the word Hamas in my prior post because the primary conflict is between them and Israel, with Hezbollah supporting Hamas and the U.S. supporting Israel. That was the basis of using Hamas in my example of attacking American military and political...

I don't disagree with what you said. The problem is lumping Hezbollah in with Hamas and picking a fight with another state actor.

I explained how so. Israel is trying to secure itself against Hamas and overtly dragging a very popular national government into the conflict will ultimately be counter-productive to its aims. Envision that Hamas managed to coordinate an attack that killed Biden, Secretary Austin, and the...

We have a similar capability to do this against any number of global malicious actors / frenemies, but we don't because the outcome would be counter-productive to our national security interests.

Likely a tactical victory but strategic blunder. US and international community is more likely to pressure Netanyahu to make concessions to Hamas to end hostilities now that Hezbollah has formally entered the conflict. And yes, everyone knows they were supporting Hamas, but imagine the response...

It wasn't a drunk post. I just said the part you're not supposed to say out loud based on years of experience that goes back to when every in PRT failure at OCS was a prior enlisted E5 / E6 who couldn't do proper pushups... because no one enforces it. Those were the only legitimate PRTs I've...

It's been 7 years since the Navy booted a sailor for PFA failures. And quite frankly, finding a friendly PRT buddy and huffing for 12 minutes on a bike set to 12 isn't going to do much "force shaping." It's just another form of quazi hazing to kick out people who aren't in with the cool kids or...

Yeah, I hear you. But if doing odd dynamic movements makes the CFLs life easier (who was laughing with us) then whatever.

The dynamic warm-ups this year got a lot of "wtfs" and laughs. They are now filled with exercises that you probably never heard of and would make a funny "I can't believe people do this at a gym" compilation. Talk about spending money to fix something that wasn't broken.

If I were a regular Joe, I'd rather be living in Russia than Ukraine right now. The people of St. Petersberg, for example, don't face life-threatening military action on a daily basis.

First, gerrymandering is a feature, not a bug, to ensure people are fully represented in the House. We do not want districts where there are 52 / 48 votes going for one party or another because it means the 48% is not represented in the federal government. Second, it would be state legislatures...

My take is based on the fact that, at a fundamental level, the President (and federal government writ large) isn't supposed to represent or advocate for the people, but for the security of the several states.

This is an unpopular opinion, but I don't think that we should have direct elections of either the President or Senators. Roll back to legislatures voting for Senators and governors should elect the President. Our founding fathers envisioned that the federal government mostly worked for the...

That's awfully generic. How are you going to identify that someone used chat GPT to generate parts of their fitreps or any other official documents? "This reads like it was written by chat GPT" isn't going to be good enough. It's a virtually impossible rule to enforce. Did you not allow...

Well, the tl: dr is chat GPT is basically a crowd sourcing app. If the crowd thinks the earth is flat, AI will also spit that out as fact. And once it's trained by big data, you can't tell it any different. Most fitreps are not EP fitreps (by instruction). So chat GPT is going to think a P...

Ok.... first an anecdote... So my kids downloaded an AI image generator, and for shits and giggles I wanted to create an image of myself and my wife doing something. So the first pass returned some images of blonde people, and we are not... so I input "brown haired..." Well, it turns out that...

Yeah, and I also can't drive faster than 65 mph on a highway (75 mph west of Nebraska-ish). But today I drove 95 mph along with several other drivers near me, and the world seems to turn just fine. Even passed a few police officers along the way who apparently weren't interested in pulling...

OP, you're being very vague in your posts. In a general sense, a PhD and naval aviation are incongruous, insofar as each one is a significant career detour from the other. You don't mention whether you are currently enrolled or applying in a PhD program. Regardless, if you decide to join the...

Yep. Sounds like OP already accepted a Navy slot, but... The Navy operates ships and therefore has little need for a large international footprint, with the exception of MPRA and some expeditionary forces. You will most likely be stationed in the US and deploy from there, on a ship, which will...

This isn't particularly helpful. It's natural for someone to be interested in long-term career goals, and you're squashing the kid for it. Our community has a 'career tacaid' that lays out sea / shore flow as well as typical shore assignments at every stage of the career, and the expectation is...

It's actually made internet search *worse.* If you Google simple facts and are blessed with a random AI beta response, you get paragraphs of nonsense tangentially related to the topic where the information you actually seek is buried under another link (maybe).

I used a fairly absurd example to illustrate the point, but these things are using internet forums, public social media posts, etc. to 'learn' information. There's a LOT of stupid out there, and AI isn't actually 'intelligent' to independently determine fact from fiction. Right now, I see its...

AI, in its current form, is just a very complicated search algorithm that uses the vast amount of information on the internet to generate its output. If the vast majority of the internet content thought the earth was flat, Chat GPT would write you an essay about why the earth is flat. And the...

The oldest Gen Z ers are 19-20 if you go by the book and ignore the media fabricated millenial / boomer culture war that shifted the timelines. So this CPT is a millenial.