Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a hilarious insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man idiosyncratic party-line Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
7hr ago
I'd recommend more anime, then. #NotJoking
Back when the internet was making anime more accessible and known, one of the things I recall about the discourse of Japanese vs American cartoons was the quote-unquote 'maturity potential' of the media. A lot of Japanese anime is as sacharine as anything American, but there's also a lot more willingness to engage in darker themes and imperfect happy endings.
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann infamously killed it's not-really-decoy protagonist a quarter of the way in, and ends with the savior of everything living alone as a widower with none of the glory of a hero. The Gundam series somewhat more famously was able to sneak a war drama into a toy advertisement because the executives didn't care, and 'Kill 'em all Tomino' went on to earn his moniker. The original Digimon ended with the children protagonists having to separate from their platonic life monsters after an almost seven-stages-of-grief. Full Metal Alchemist has an optimistic ending, but only after some real costs.
These aren't even the sort of genres or tragedies intended to make you miserable. The above are fairly optimistic, even triumphant, finales.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
No second Carnegie link, I'm afraid, just bad phrasing.
Hope the articles are at least interesting!
War On The Rocks had a goodish writeup on the overall conflict timeline- this one iirc- last year. It may not be the detail / specificity you're looking for, but if I had to review Operation Sindoor I'd probably start there first for a refresher.
RUSI had a lessons learned report, mostly on how the air operations may fit into future Pakistan-India tit-for-tats, which you can see here.
Carnegie had their own military lessons learned here.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
The sort of muddy impression that I have right now is that Pakistan gave India a bloody nose and India turned around and drop-kicked Pakistan across the ring.
I am genuinely curious what gave you the 'drop-kicked Pakistan across the ring' impression. Not even in the 'I think you're wrong but am curious how you got there' sense, but just that I haven't really heard that perspective outside of the red flag propoganda-dripped areas, and I know that's not what you base your opinion on.
But finding objective Western documentation of the conflict seems difficult.
I think part of it is the lack of strategic depth, and the nature of the bloody nose. Pakistan gave back specifically in the air domain and with Chinese systems that are most relevant to the Pacific. By contrast, most other things- even if a total Indian win- wouldn't be that applicable abroad, even as the Indians were never going to be able to make that much progress without hitting the nuclear red lines.
So the war ended shortly regardless, and then the Western interest was on one area in particular.
The "most powerful military in the world" should be able to produce common weaponry at meaningful scale,
Tube artillery ammo is produced at meaningful scale, contingent on 'meaningful' actually corresponding to 'relevant and plausible scenarios.'
Shike's question, still standing, is still applicable.
If that's not the scenario you are envisioning, please explain to me the scenario you envision US forces using 155mm against China in.
-because if it's any sort of inter-island campaign, 155mm demand isn't that large for multiple reasons, and if it's some hypothetical land war in asia, than Shrike's point spin-up time also still applies (as well as the question of what scenario, specifically, someone is wanting to point at).
and I'll repeat that there being an ocean between us and China is not the nail in the coffin you believe it to be.
If you believe the water that is the issue is an ocean, you are rather validating the suspicion that you haven't looked at the relevant regional maps for a practical scenario.
If you'd like to propose a particular scenario, we could, but I am fairly sure we'd quickly reach a point where even you'd concede that artillery shell production stateside is far, far less important an industrial policy goal than many other pre-requisites.
Most of our wars have crossed water.
And none of them used 155mm as an inter-island weapon system during naval wars or island campaigns.
When artillery was used on island campaigns, absolute and relative artillery shell production had very little to do with how the campaigns resolved compared to other factors like naval access or denial.
Were China to reorient all of its maritime imports and exports to overland traffic through the Siberian Steppe, over the Hindu Kush, or across the jungles of South Asia to bypass an American naval blockade, that would be one of the most fortuitous self-destructions of a national economic model in modern history.
It would also be really, really vulnerable to the sort of low-cost/highly-transportable small precision munitions that would be getting a lot, lot more attack vectors to target Chinese commerce than are available within China itself.
China is a land power.
In the defense-industrial sense? Heavens no.
China is a maritime-dependent mercantilist. It economic capital is built upon the cost-efficiencies of maritime traffic for both imports to feed its factories and exports to generate the commercial surpluses to pay for the imports to feed said factories, including things like artillery shell factories. For all that China makes its rail investments a matter of national pride, it has not come close to making it competitive at scale with maritime shipping.
If you want to have any sort of economies of scale competition with China, the first and most important thing is to cut off its most efficient economic import and processing capabilities, not to shell its factories with artillery.
it seems to me that war often doesn't end up going the way you think it's going to go, and confidently saying you aren't going to need something is rarely a wise move.
Does it also seem to you a wise idea to confidently insistent you need more of a weapon system without looking at a map of where it might be employed?
If not, would you consider reconsidering about whether some things about wars are actually consistently predictable, not least of which is the impacts of geography and range?
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Awkward counter-argument. The allied strategic interest in the Burma campaign wasn't to try and out-produce and then out-shoot Japan shell for shell, but to maximize the Japanese logistic costs as Japan's over-expansion made it vulnerable. If, say, the Americans had reallocated naval production to artillery shell production in order to bask in artillery overmatch, it would have been a really dunderheaded move.
Russia didn't want to need artillery in Ukraine.
Russia did, however, want to have a war against a contiguous neighbor in artillery range, which in turn gave artillery a ready application and logistical tail.
Furthermore, not even credibly being able to do it then constrains all your options if you were ever to escalate, and both parties know it, so even capabilities that you never intend to deploy can be relevant.
If you wanted to escalate a war against China, artillery would be pretty marginal. Before you could mass artillery in range, you'd have to overcome the Chinese investments in anti-access into the theater in the first place. If you could do that, then you could just shut down China's import routes, which artillery wouldn't be particularly relevant in doing.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
You’ve got it backwards. Clusterfucks like this factory exist because the MIC has been obsessed with discipline. Since the war in Iraq, we’ve favored low-volume, high-tech “exquisite” solutions with long development cycles. It wasn’t like the Afghans were going to leapfrog us, right? Low-rate production fit our low-intensity conflicts.
Trying to scale that to the levels needed for Ukraine, let alone China, led the government to wildly overcorrect. Letting the Army issue UCAs is a high-variance strategy. Spend too much money and hope that some of it pays off.
I'd generally agree with this, with a nod to history as well. When countries start to mobilize their military industrial bases for war / ramp up, the general balance of 'cost vs speed vs quality' gets upended. You are lucky to consistently get one and sometimes two of those inn peacetime, but then it's fortunate to get even one as the money race begins. Between corruption, inexperience, and incompetence amongst all the new blood chasing the new money, process quality often goes down.
This is normal, and predictable, and possibly even unavoidable in same way that accidents happen if you bring enough teenage boys and girls together without sufficient supervision. You can find tales of procurement corruption in American history (feel free to laugh at the American Civil War), the most militarized police states (see the Nazi war econnomy), and state-command economies (see China metal production in the great leap forward period... and quality scandals over the last few decades). None of this predictability makes it a non-issue or 'acceptable,' but it's not exactly uniquely ruinous, or unique in any real sense.
But really, one of the nice things about a relatively free media ecosystem is how such media environments provide almost free quality-control prods for public awareness. It's rarely the countries with easily pointable corruption scandals that do worse, despite having more stories. It's the countries where the corruption scandals are rarer because the corruption isn't brought to light, or even crime against the state actors to do so.
Ah, younger child?
In that case, I would actually recommend Digimon, series 1 and 3 in particular. If she can accept the dated animation style and the call-out-your-attacks monster battle format, there's a surprisingly deep childhood development story (or several) in there, with aspects for both boys and girls. Even if monster media are typically boy-coded, in contrast to pokemon the digimon companions are all fully-thinking characters in their own right who serve as foils for their child, both as a mix of easy best friend but also someone who gives them the push they need outside of their comfort zone. One of the conceits of the franchise is basically that maturity begets power. So the general format of an episode is that the focus human child is grappling with some flaw/fear/insecurity, overcomes it with the help of their companion, and emerges a marginally better child... but with much growing to go, and sometimes entire character arcs struggling with an issue, because these are 50-60 episode series.
The first Digimon series, Digimon Adventure, is basically a sort of Narnia-isekai where a bunch of kids at a summer camp find themselves in a mysterious new world with no adults to rely on. So they have to band together, figure out how to survive while trying to find a way back home, overcome interpersonal tensions to become friends who recognize eachother's strengths, and overcome their own weaknesses to become fully actualized. Along the way they stumble into / realize they are part of a much larger meta-plot, which forces them to face different sorts of malevolent forces that would harm / manipulate / exploit them, even as they make their own mistakes, forcing even greater maturity.
The third Digimon series, Digimon Tamers, is urban fantasy secret pet genre, but also an early 2000s AI allegory story. The kids are in 'real' Japan where digimon are 'just' children's media, but then the 'main' viewpoint character finds his partner, who was just born and has the mentality of a child, and has to keep it a secret from his family while starting to counter the digimon starting to emerge into the real world. A smaller core cast lets there be a bit more focus onto them, with greater themes of growing into maturity and responsibility but also forgiveness and redemption. Compared to the previous two, it delves more into the 'alien mindset' of not just monsters-from-another-world, but AI in particular who have various degrees of caring about humans across the spectrum.
Am I claiming it's a marvel of writing you'll love? Probably not. But it might be something you could tolerably appreciate while a child looks at the pretty colors or flashy monsters, and they might get a good moral or two out of it.
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