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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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If you could do that, then you could just shut down China's import routes, which artillery wouldn't be particularly relevant in doing.

This seems overly optimistic about the power of sea- and air-based warfare. I'm far from the first person to note that America is fundamentally a sea power and struggles to prevent sanction-busting on land. China is a land power. I'm not saying that America couldn't make life very annoying with a sea-based blockade, but as a guy on the far left of those bell curve memes, 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.

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?