Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog 2/14/2023
After talking to his government sources, Peter Zeihan thinks that we won The Great Balloon War, having gained valuable insights by capturing Chinese tech, and that the entire episode is another symptom of high level CCP dysfunction.
Some takeaways:
• “What the Chinese were technically trying to do: They were doing overflight of a lot of our military bases, specifically our ICBM launch facilities, because the Chinese are new to having a nuclear deterrent.”
• “Remember that as early as the 1970s, the United States had over 30,000 nuclear weapons, about one-third of which would have been deployed by missile. Now, with arms control treaties and the post-cold war environment, we have slimmed that down to just a few hundred.” Here Zeihan is wrong. The declared number of nuclear warheads the United States possesses is 3,750, but those numbers don’t count tactical nuclear weapons. Including those yields an estimate in the 5,500 range, though some 1,800 of those are slated for dismantlement.
• “But the United States has a deep bench of experience in building and maintaining these things and the Chinese simply don’t.”
• “Balloons are big, they’re slow moving, you can’t maneuver them very well, they’re obvious.”
• He reiterates his theory that Xi has purged any possible successor and surrounded himself with slavish yes-men.
• “It just never occurred to me that they could be that dumb. Well, turns out the rampant stupidity that is taking over decision making in Chinese policy has now reached a bit of a break point.”
More:
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=54115https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuGLQZ646o8
