Born Hunter
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Everything posted by Born Hunter
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That is exactly why imo. Entering the straits now will not be without serious risk. A lucky ballistic missile or a sneaky UUV sinking a warship would be politically catastrophic, and potentially the turning point for completely dragging the US into a long war. Having international support going into that and of course the midterms would be a huge boost for Trump.
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Do you think Trump would see the difference between “we can’t” and “we won’t”? It’s a real simple decision for Starmer because none of his voter base want it, he looks principled at a time when he’s 20 u-turns deep. The yanks started a war unilaterally, have spent the last several years telling us how weak we are, after 20 yrs of ME clusterfucks and now expect us to wade in with them. Even I find that outrageous. Add to that the fact that our carriers have no real standoff offensive weapons right now because of Lockheed continually delaying the integration of our weapons to the UK lighte
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They have to do a certain amount of drills and exercises before deploying. They could of course forgo these but that would then introduce risk during the deployment. I guess that risk has been deemed unacceptable given the assets already in the region.
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So like I said you missed my point. It wasn’t a solution it was a tool for demonstrating the real problem, lack of priority in government and the electorate.
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It will be super interesting to see if marines are deployed to capture island/s. A significant part of their doctrine in a potential future war with china is island hoping. A successful operation would send a big message to the Chinese. I wonder how the US citizens feel about boots on the ground though.
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Why reference what I said then? Of course the burden is upon the tax payer. They make up the electorate and decide through elections what their money is spent on. And time and again fail to prioritise defence or its funding. Fail to hold government accountable for waste or dumb initiatives. I just find it so lazy to always say “we’ll use the foreign aid budget”. Like that isn’t one tenth what is needed or even a political reality.
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There is simply not the political will from the government or the electorate to pay for a military proportionate to our expectations. Using a doubling of income tax was a simple example for what would be needed. Yes of course alternatively you could pay for it by diverting funds from other spending or find efficiencies but I find that frankly lazy because it’s proven no more doable than raising taxes. Even if all that could be done you would then be faced with the same political dilemma we face with every other budget/tax scenario, e.g., “spend it on anything other than defence”. The Brit
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Then you missed my point.
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Interesting seeing the response to this war (and the Epstein saga) from Trumps base. Just regular god fearing patriotic hard working Americans. Kinda the same shift in feelings that we are seeing towards Farage in the UK. I think the Republicans will get murdered in the midterms. I don’t think it’s likely but I wouldn’t rule out criminal trials tbh. Trumps tearing up the sort of political norms that protect presidents.
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Underrated! Everyone raves about it! There was outrage when the DoD said they were replacing the A10s with the F35 in the CAS role.
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173! I very much doubt any US ground force of that size is operating in Iran.
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I think there have been many successful campaigns, even against Muslim enemies that show that a war can be fought to Western standards without resorting to salted earth and genocide. But there is no magic book of military strategy. Does this feel like one of the US’ great military moments? The stated goal of the US is regime change, to one that is aligned and compliant to US interests, like much of the Arab side of the Muslim world is. They want the moderates and rebels of Iran to rise to take power after the US has hamstrung the oppressive regime that is in power. If the US have too many
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I’m not suggesting sitting down with the enemy to have a cup of tea. This is plainly pragmatic, if your actions in war increase the resolve of the enemy and acts to increase their recruitment then you have a shit strategy that either ends in your defeat or a pivot to effectively genocide. To say that killing the children of Iranians (or more accurately as you say Muslims) doesn’t matter because they don’t care about anything other than allah is just ludicrous. Like they raise a family because it’s fun! They love their kids just like we love ours, and they grieve just like we do when they’
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Allah isn’t even part of the equation here, kill someone’s child and they will look to kill you back. Even if they put their god in front of their family. Which a common value shared with most Christian Americans. God, family, country.
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I’m not quick to forget anything mate. My point is that the war should be working towards positive change. And bombing schools does not achieve that. And the way the us political leadership are acting I’m not at all surprised it happened so soon. There is a point when a strategy of striking military targets to achieve political change fails if you have too many accidents and create more enemy than you kill. This war is going as well as Iraq or Afghan at this stage. It’s the bit the yanks do well. But that school strike is one good example of how things go wonky very f***ing quickly.
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Fair. But who’s ‘they’? The regime? Agree. The family? Totally disagree.
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If one good thing comes out of this for the UK (strictly imo, many will disagree) it’s the realisation of how much our military power and readiness has been degraded. I think even Joe bloggs feels a bit of embarrassment on behalf of his country over this. I’ve been saying for years now that we are entering a new era global power struggle and investing in defence is not a luxury. We have so many weaknesses that only get exposed at times like this. Fortunately this time it’s just embarrassing, next time it could be catastrophic.
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I sympathise with a lot of what you say. Equally wouldn’t trust an Israeli as far as I could chuck one. The counter to all this “killing the regime is good” is that within five minutes the yanks dropped a TLAM into a school and deleted over a hundred children. Now you don’t need to be an Islamist, a Muslim or even religious to see how that can motivate a loved one to dedicate their life to revenge. As impressive as the American war machine is, their leadership are acting like chimpanzees.
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It’s a bit presumptuous that our carrier is going to the Middle East to help the yanks. But then I doubt any of his posts are run by his national security advisor or ambassador. He’s just lashing out because he’s upset with Starmer over the bases and Chagos. He's still in the honeymoon period with their ‘war that’s not a war’. It’s the bit the yanks do well. The lasting change that they are historically bad at and come to bite them hard. If they don’t achieve effective regime change then all they will have done is stirred the hornets nest once again. Short term they may have d
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Early 1900s colonial era 12 month safari! If a Time Machine is out of scope then either some sort of dangerous game hound hunt (mountain lion / leopard) or another mountain rifle hunt, dall sheep or goat in NA.
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It funded the thatcher era tax cuts didn’t it? Essentially ‘we’ spent it as soon as we got it. And iirc it is like an effective 90% rate so they f***ing raped it to death.
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Agree, I’m not sure that bombing Iran is the right thing to do but whatever we do we should do from a position of strength. What we as a nation are doing now does not look strong. Also, Iran would be like Iraq x10. From a purely pragmatic point of view I think we are in an era of whoever has the biggest stick is in the right, and with that I’d probably opt to back the yanks up to but not including an invasion. I’d like to see us have the capability to comprehensively defend our territories, evacuate all citizens, be a lead in defending shipping in the straits and seizing Iranian tankers.
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I find it wild that we are even having conversations about redirecting our forces for border control. A nation of our size and history should be able to carry out effective border control with drones, ships and maritime boarding units and still defend all overseas bases and territories from air strikes and still carry out a carrier training operation in the high north and have sufficient specialist units forward deployed to evacuate and rescue British nationals caught out. And frankly, in addition to all that, be able to fight a sustain brigade/division level land war if needed. That should be
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I genuinely don’t think we have the stomach for it mate. We need twenty years of conservatism to fix the national security and economic problems we have and that won’t happen. The harder the pendulum swings one way the harder it will swing back the other.
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The problem with this is it’s just an excuse not to do it. The entire country, Westminster and the electorate will play political tennis and negligently put off finding the actual money to fund it. So again, whether it’s a simple raise in tax or budgetary overhaul, it won’t happen because the country doesn’t have the appetite for it. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong but that is the reality of our current defence situation in the uk.
