US plans IMO will probably avoid or limit kinetic direct hot war with China and rely on hybrid war as they did with the USSR

Okay, but again, I just want to see you lay out an analysis for how this could be done. How do you see such a hybrid war being carried out? What moves would they make? You can't just dismiss arguments pointing to the material limitations of US power by saying "well they'll just do a hybrid war instead". xiaohongshu used make various arguments about financial systems, which I personally didn't always find super credible, but at least they were arguments, not vague waving at some secret card the US must totally have in its deck.

but the intellect remain pondering bad outcomes and possibilities and preparing to live with them and keep moving onwards

There's a difference between pondering potential bad outcomes and just inventing them out of whole cloth. The pondering has to still be based on material analysis of what's actually possible, otherwise you'll drive yourself insane with highly improbable hypotheticals. Like, what if an asteroid hits Beijing next month and China just collapses, and it's a thousand-year American reich afterwards? I guess it could theoretically happen, but it's not very productive to spend brainpower on such scenarios.

You said "conflict they intend to instigate", sorry if I misinterpreted that but it sounded like you were talking about a hot war

That's why I can't put total stock in this narrative of hope and locked-in, in-escapable demise for the worst empire the world

But again, this is not the narrative I, or others, are necessarily pushing. My view is that the US as a global hegemon is on its way out - but as a regional hegemon, in the Americas, it probably still has a lot of juice left. I've made the argument before that US withdrawal from the periphery will lead to a reasserting of authority in its immediate vicinity (so, bad news for Cuba, unfortunately...). They're going to be causing trouble for decades more - but there isn't going to be another Gulf War, they just don't have the capacity to deploy that many assets anymore.

most of its enemies are incompetents not run by scientific socialists who I believe have that power incompetents do to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory

And is the empire not full of incompetents too? This seems to be a pattern that keeps popping up, the assumption that since the US is the global hegemon that must mean they're totally competent and secretly running a 5D chess game behind the scenes, despite all evidence to the contrary. The US keeps making profoundly stupid decisions. If we're going to consider the scenario of anti-imperialist countries fucking up, why wouldn't we consider the scenario of the US, say, getting involved in a stupid pointless war, burning all its munitions, and collapsing its economy? Why would the first one of these be valid and the second one not? What evidence do we have to go on for the US being so competent? Now, certainly, we shouldn't rely on the them being dumb, but we also shouldn't just assume all these other countries are stupid, that does a great disservice to the people actually in active struggle against the empire. Saying "most of its enemies are incompetents" I feel is a deeply unfair statement, certainly there are critiques to be made, but "incompetents"? Come on.

that has shown a dramatic ability to reshape the world and move mountains and repeatedly do the impossible due to its size

Has it shown that ability? This is a wild overestimation of the US - they became the hegemon because the other prospective hegemons beat the shit out of each other in two world wars, and they had a continent with a ton of resources. What amazing feats has the US actually pulled off, that put it so far above other empires? If anything, the Brits should get this kind of credit, given the scale of their conquests from the starting point of the British Isles. And, well, their empire eventually decayed just as well.

In fact, this situation is precisely an argument for why the US might not make it out of this just fine. They've had one of the most spoiled existences as an empire, they never had a Cannae moment of an enemy at the gates with most of their army slaughtered (the Burning of Washington maybe sort of counts, but in terms of actual military casualties it's nowhere close) , they've always had oceans protecting them from interference by other prospective empires, they've had a great wealth of natural resources, all of this is evidence for the empire not being built to withstand actual great adversity.

too much based off of unreliable "analysis" channels without access to real detailed information

Okay, but what sources are your analyses based on?

control of global shipping straits

The US doesn't fully control shipping straits though, that's the point I'm making! The US of the Cold War may have - but the one of today is struggling with readiness issues on its ships and pathetically slow construction of new ones. Their navy is still ahead of everyone else's, but being №1 doesn't directly translate to actually being able to control the entire ocean. They literally had all of their active carriers occupied by Iran until recently! How do you see them controlling several chokepoints all at once given their current performance?

land air and naval bases

Which have just been demonstrated to be highly vulnerable?

China can devastate US presence in the SCS and push them out but they don't have force projection to push them out of Diego Garcia or Somaliland or Greenland or the Panama Canal.

Sure, I agree, and I've also made the point about Chinese power projection before (with regard to the idea of them supporting Latin American countries against the US). But, firstly, China can do affect more than just the South China Sea - they can hit Guam, they can hit American bases in Korea and Japan, and in pushing the US out of the SCS they may well sink a bunch of ships, which will in turn limit the Americans' own ability to project power. Again, as described above, the US Navy is struggling to keep several concurrent deployments, if their situation gets even worse, their supposed control over shipping is going to degrade.

And secondly, I feel like you're pretty dismissive of what kicking the US out of the SCS would actually mean. There's a reason the US has all these bases all over the place - if they could just do the "work-from-home" equivalent for global imperialism, and run everything from the mainland, they would. But, instead, they've built all these bases - because distance actually matters, and the further away from any prospective enemy your bases are, the more of a logistical burden it becomes to sustain operations against them. The US being kicked out of the SCS and further Pacific islands would be a massive blow, and without those bases any control over the rest of the Pacific becomes more tenuous too.

And as for those bases you've listed,

Diego Garcia

This is not super relevant for conflict against China, beyond potentially basing strategic bombers. As we've seen from Iran, strategic bombardment campaigns, even with all the modern bells and whistles, remain of limited effectiveness, and given that China has a navy, after they're done with the SCS, if they're still worried about Diego Garcia they could try to move on it as well. They could hit it with sub-launched missiles too, plus, they have a substantial fleet of strategic bombers to run their own campaign with - and when you have a specific base in the middle of nowhere to target, rather than an entire country, bombing can actually be very effective, as Iran demonstrated. Also, this being a lone base means it's very vulnerable logistically - again, that's why the US builds a lot of bases, not just one here-and-there, so those bases can operate in a network and support one another.

To some extent one can try to exert control over the Indian ocean from it, but, as described above, the US doesn't have the ships for it - blockading a chokepoint is one thing, you can concentrate your ships in a small space, but chasing ships down all over a massive ocean is something else. And, again, this being a single base in the middle of the ocean means there's only so many assets it can support, only so many ships that can be stationed in it, and the base itself will need to have a whole bunch of resources brought to it too.

Somaliland

The US already doesn't control the Bab-el-Mandeb, despite having a presence right off of it! Like, this is specifically evidence for the US not controlling shipping routes - and if they try to do their own blockade on the other side of it, any assets they deploy there would be just as vulnerable as the Gulf bases were. During the Iran War, the USS Ford stayed in the Red Sea and never dared to actually sail past Yemen.

Greenland or the Panama Canal

Not really relevant for a conflict against China. As I said above, the US would likely assert its authority more strongly in its backyard, but that doesn't matter here - the Americans could build a fucking dome over North America and some surrounding territories and the rest of the world would just... go on. The big worry was the US managing to cut China off from other markets - but with Russia and Iran still standing, China has a pretty big market to the north and continued access to the Middle East (although there's still some infrastructure investment to be done on that end). As we've established, China will also be able to contest the US in the Western Pacific, so they're fine on that end. And with the US weakened in the Middle East and in East Asia, any effort to exert control over the Indian Ocean will be pretty dubious, so access to Africa remains as well.

The US may be able to cut China off from access to South America, but even that's probably only going to be partial - as mentioned above, blockading a chokepoint is one thing, blockading entire oceans or shorelines is another. Germany in WW1 could be blockaded because its shoreline is basically just nestled between a bunch of chokepoints - the geography of South America is rather different. The US could probably manage to control the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, as well as the South American countries bordering it, pretty well, but the further south you get the more difficult it's going to be.

German carmakers are embarking on their deepest ever restructuring to stem “the bleeding” from an influx of Chinese rivals that analysts warn could “permanently” shrink the backbone of Europe’s largest economy. Volkswagen is preparing to expand its cost-cutting measures by axing as many as 100,000 jobs over the coming years and end production at four plants in Germany. BMW recently warned investors that it plans to spend up to €1bn in restructuring costs, which analysts said could lead to cuts of up to 10,000 jobs and a 15 per cent reduction in European car production. Mercedes-Benz told employees in Germany that summer bonuses would not be paid out as it stepped up cost-cutting. Some 5,500 staff have already taken voluntary redundancy under its current restructuring programme.

"voluntary" redundancy, truly, euphemisms are one area of the economy in which capitalism remains unmatched with its innovation, no evil communist dictatorship could ever come up with this shit

All European car manufacturers — from Stellantis and Renault to Ford — have been streamlining their operations in recent years, but the penetration of BYD and other Chinese brands has dramatically picked up pace this year amid a sharp slowdown in China. That has forced German carmakers to retrench, despite strong resistance from their powerful unions. “The only thing you can do is cut costs, and the only significant cost reduction is excess capacity. And the most expensive capacity you have in the world by a long distance is [in] Germany,” said Citi analyst Harald Hendrikse. In May, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis and Renault all lost market share despite new car sales in Europe rising 4 per cent year-on-year. Meanwhile, the aggregate market share of BYD, Chery and other Chinese carmakers topped 10 per cent for the first time, according to European car industry group Acea. “Every European player is losing today,” said Thomas Besson, head of autos research at Kepler Cheuvreux. “This is a highly challenging situation for European automakers because Chinese [carmakers] are progressing [in Europe] at a much faster pace than expected, while [the European carmakers] continue to lose volumes in China and face very adverse conditions in the US, notably due to tariffs.”

Wolfsburg-based Volkswagen had already laid out its intention to cut 50,000 jobs in Germany by the end of 2030 but the latest plan could lead headcount to be slashed by another 50,000, according to one person familiar with the situation. Culling 100,000 roles from a workforce of around 625,000 would place it among the biggest-ever job cuts. “I think even with that it’s questionable whether they will get ahead of the [Chinese] wave so that they can actually restore some profitability, rather than just slow down the bleeding,” UBS analyst Patrick Hummel said. The size of the potential new cuts showed the crisis affecting Volkswagen and its peers was reaching a “new dimension”, added Helena Wisbert, professor for automotive economics at the Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences in Wolfsburg. “The automotive industry in Germany is shrinking, and doing so in a lasting, permanent way.”

BMW was the sole European carmaker that increased sales in the continent in May, but the group shocked investors this month with a significant cut to its profit guidance, which was attributed to a market downturn in China and the impact of the Iran war.

critical support to Comrade Trump in his heroic effort to crash what's left of the Western economy

Included in the downward revision were provisions for new restructuring measures such as job cuts to be booked later this year. Since its warning in mid-June, BMW’s shares have slumped 13 per cent with investors preparing for more guidance cuts from other European carmakers. “BMW was seen by almost everybody as the best house in a difficult neighbourhood and that status got lost with this profit warning,” Hummel said.

honey, new just dropped!

The Munich-based manufacturer had already indicated that it expects a reduction in its global workforce this year of up to 5 per cent, which could mean as much as 7,700 people. Hummel estimated that the latest provisions could raise that figure to nearly 10,000. BMW declined to comment on the planned scope of its cost-cutting measures, while new chief executive Milan Nedeljković has stressed the need for the company to “significantly intensify and accelerate” its efforts to make savings. Mercedes-Benz, which has also been hit hard by sharply declining sales in China, has warned employees that German manufacturing was weighing on cost competitiveness. The company also estimated that its output would immediately improve 15 per cent if its workers returned to a 40-hour working week from 35 hours that has broadly been in place since 1995. “We must continue to cut costs with great urgency so that we can remain price-competitive,” it said. “Despite all our efforts, the situation in Germany today is critical.”

Now, some of those wounded soldiers tell CBS News the injuries were far more serious than the official designation provided by the military. Chief Warrant Officer Rodney Bearman's body was riddled with shrapnel in the early hours of the war on March 1 when an Iranian drone slammed into his work station in Kuwait. Medical records reviewed by CBS News show he also suffered a concussion, hearing and vision loss, and damage to his lungs. The Army has classified his condition as "not seriously injured." "That assessment is unacceptable," his wife, Amy Bearman, told CBS News in an interview. Chief Bearman, 57, was one of more than 20 hurt in the deadliest strike of the conflict on American soldiers and the worst attack on American troops since 2021. The Bearmans are also among several survivors and their families who told CBS News they weren't being treated by the military as combat casualties for reasons they could not understand — a claim an Army spokesman strongly denied. In several cases, injured service members said they had been cleared for duty. But that "duty" involves active orders to recuperate from injuries in specialized "soldier recovery units." (A Pentagon spokesperson told CBS News that soldiers in recovery units are not counted as having returned to duty.)

Sergeant First Class Cory Hicks, 37, also suffered severe shrapnel wounds from the blast and underwent multiple emergency surgeries at a Kuwaiti hospital. He said his wife was told by an Army official after the strike that his injuries were "minor." "They said your husband was injured, he has a minor jaw injury, and he's going to be returned to duty," said Hicks. He told CBS News he "absolutely" believes the Army and the Pentagon have tried to downplay the incident. In a statement to CBS News, the Army strongly pushed back against that claim and said such military designations as "not seriously injured" and "combat casualty" had specific definitions that were being misconstrued by the families. "The care and well-being of our Soldiers is of the highest priority," an Army spokesperson wrote. "Any assertion that the Army seeks to downplay a soldier's injuries is simply not true." Citing Army protocols, an Army spokesman explained that a soldier who is classified as "seriously injured" or "very seriously injured" is someone at risk of dying from their wounds within 72 hours.

A life-changing phone call

Amy Bearman said she knew to stay away from the TV when the U.S. launched Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28. Her husband had left for Kuwait in September 2025 — his fifth deployment since they were married nearly 25 years ago. His unit, the Iowa-based 103rd Sustainment Command, relocated from Camp Arifjan to a small tactical outpost at Port of Shuaiba weeks before war broke out. "A lot of friends were calling, texting and wanting to know what I knew," Bearman told CBS News. "From being a military spouse for the last almost 25 years, I knew that if anything ever happened to my husband while he was serving, I knew I would receive either an official phone call or an official visit." On March 1, an Iranian drone slammed into the multi-trailer work station at Port of Shuaiba. The next day, Amy Bearman received an official call from Fort Knox. "They told me that my husband's injuries were classified as NSI, and they described that, or they defined that, as 'not seriously injured,'" she recalled. "He was treated and released back to duty. That was a huge relief. I think maybe that was the first time that I took a breath in 24 hours." But her husband's injuries turned out to be worse than she said the Army led her to believe. On March 3, Amy Bearman received another phone call, this time from her husband, Rodney, who had just spent the night in a Kuwaiti hospital. "I could just hear him breathing and then he finally said, 'I'm going to be OK.' I waited a few moments and then asked if he returned to duty. It seemed like forever before he answered me, and then he said, 'I can't go back.'" The strike on Port of Shuaiba killed six U.S. soldiers.

In April, a CBS News investigation revealed there were multiple warnings ahead of the strike, related to force protection. Soldiers told CBS News they were left unprotected from the drone attack despite intelligence showing Iran was targeting their position in Kuwait. The findings sparked an investigation from Senate Democrats. CBS News then spoke with other survivors of the blast who detailed requests to leadership for more resources ahead of the strike. Those requests focused on the number of medical personnel as well as the availability and accessibility of medical supplies. "This was a failure," Major Stephen Ramsbottom said in an interview with CBS News last month, adding he believed Master Sergeant Nicole Amor, one of the six soldiers killed, could have survived her wounds had there been a doctor, a fixed aid station or more than one ambulance at the post. The soldiers, according to witnesses, instead triaged themselves with makeshift bandages, braces and tourniquets. They commandeered civilian vehicles to drive the wounded to two local Kuwaiti hospitals.

Doctors noted that Bearman perhaps should have stayed longer in the hospital in Kuwait, but the Army "pulled him out" because of security concerns, medical records show. The Army spokesperson said the investigation into "the facts and circumstances of the attack" has been completed, and findings from the probe will be released once next of kin have been briefed. "Our hope for the investigation is that an honest assessment by the Army will prevent this from happening again to other service members," said Amy Bearman. Once stabilized, Hicks was airlifted to Landstuhl Medical Center in Germany and later to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland, where he required inpatient care for several weeks. Now nearly four months since the attack, he remains at Walter Reed in a soldier recovery unit with a "pretty severe" traumatic brain injury, and expects to stay there for at least the next six months. A spokesperson for Walter Reed declined to comment due to privacy laws. In a written statement to CBS News, an Army spokesman declined to comment on what was told to Hicks' wife, but said, "What I can tell you is that SFC Hicks received the care and treatment necessary in theater to prepare him for evacuation outside of the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility to receive a higher level of care as dictated by his wounds."

Army defends "not seriously injured" designation

Chief Bearman returned to the United States on March 18, still injured and still with pieces of shrapnel throughout his body. Bearman himself then applied for and was granted a request to be assigned to a soldier recovery unit at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which was within driving distance from his wife, Amy, and their home in West Virginia. On March 26, Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito wrote to the Army on Bearman's behalf, seeking clarity and answers on what happened to him in Kuwait and why Amy was told her husband was "not seriously injured." Nearly two months later, on May 13, Major General Michael J. Leeney responded to Capito and Bearman, defending the [not seriously injured] designation but noting "this technical classification is in no way intended to minimize [Chief Warrant Officer] Bearman's contribution and sacrifice."

One reason is that research funds are being diverted to operations. The Pentagon’s “research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E) infrastructure is deteriorating and weakening the Department’s ability to maintain a technically advanced warfighting capability,” warned the report by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. “Authorized major military construction (MILCON) projects for modernization of critical joint-mission RDT&E infrastructure continually slip due to the services’ reprioritizing of scarce MILCON funds toward other operationally relevant priorities.” The study examined government laboratories as well as federally funded think tanks and university research centers. Investigators visited 30 of these sites — or about one-third of total facilities — in what the report termed “unprecedented data collection.” The report presented a mixed picture of the Pentagon’s research backbone. It found the defense research enterprise, or DRE, “is fundamentally sound.” However, it also “needs to rapidly adapt to a new environment moving at the accelerating pace of commercial technology and driven by a broader set of global security threats.”

Research has been hampered by backlogged security clearances, limited funds to build or refurbish labs and a slow and difficult hiring process that discourages younger skilled personnel. Nor does DoD have a clear handle on its research infrastructure, including a comprehensive list of specialized facilities, such as the Triaxial Earthquake and Shock Simulator in Illinois. Pentagon research facilities don’t even speak a common language, the report states. “For example, a single technical domain may be variously labeled as ‘Human-Machine Teaming,’ ‘Autonomy and Teaming,’ or ‘AI Agent Development’ depending on the reporting entity,” the report noted. “This semantic variability ensures that high- level titles alone are insufficient for determining the true depth or specificity of the work being performed.” Further, the Pentagon is not taking full advantage of its own discoveries. DoD’s “vast intellectual property remains underutilized due to passive marketing and the lack of a centralized discovery mechanism,” said the report. “Current administrative burdens for transition agreements often exceed the funding timelines of startups, hindering innovation and collaboration.”

This results in delays in new technologies reaching the field. “The Department’s ability to rapidly transition technologies from knowledge producers to capability fielders is severely degraded by structural and cultural barriers, specifically bureaucratic stovepipes, fragmented funding streams, and misaligned mechanisms, authorities, and incentives,” the report said. The report took care to state that it is not calling for Pentagon research centers to be closed. “The evidence in this report does not support consolidating or eliminating institutions: Most overlap is driven by mission need,” the report says. “The findings suggest that the way to reform the DRE is to fix the system around its institutions — how authority, money, and decisions flow, and how the institutions are funded, measured, and governed.” The study points to China as an example for DoD’s research infrastructure, including partnering with the commercial sector. “China has solidified its civil-military fusion model and is investing on a scale and at a pace that requires the United States to develop a new Government-industry paradigm — one that advances and protects critical defense research while extending the technical reach of the DRE through industrial and academic partnerships the DRE itself does not own.”

The report made numerous recommendations, including easing budgetary limits on lab refurbishment, using AI to speed up security clearances and creating a searchable database for DoD intellectual property. “Without a robust, agile, and properly resourced DRE, the department cannot rapidly onramp innovative capabilities or deliver the advanced capabilities the warfighter requires to deter and, if necessary, defeat emerging threats in an era of intense strategic competition,” the report concluded.