List Of Top Military Countries

Discussion in 'Latest US & World News' started by Jeannette, Aug 6, 2019.

  1. Iranian Monitor

    Iranian Monitor Well-Known Member

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    The quality of information I bring to this board is backed up by sources that are considered pretty reliable in the real world. While I don't think your example about the mission to the Atlantic is a case of propaganda, as much as complications Iran facing unanticipated problems realizing a mission it is planning and working on, the fact that Iran engages in as much propaganda as the nonsense you like to rely on isn't the issue. Surely, Iran engages in propaganda as well. But the issue here was reports I cited which didn't rely on Iranian propaganda or reports, and which you wanted to dispute without any basis whatsoever based on the gibberish you have written. Indeed, your own penchant for engaging in propaganda is evident by the tactics you prefer.

    In the context of the discussion which you felt you needed to divert by this nonsense, the issue that was being discussed was Iran's F-14 and the extend to which US efforts (which have been focused and have gone to extreme lengths) have been successful? Not a single, credible, source would imagine those efforts have been successful. Iran's F-14's have been tagged by and tagged US operated aircraft in recent years and every analyst who follows developments regarding Iran's F-14s knows they are being modernized, overhauled, and the F-14AM now carries the Fakour 90 missile. And there isn't anything else I posted on Iran's weapon systems which are in serious dispute. To what extent they can prove themselves in battle is a different issue, but many of them already have.

    As for being "selective" in my response, quite the opposite. The only thing I intentionally avoided responding to was about "Military Watch Magazine". As I mentioned, the publication is rated highly by many defense analyst and regarded among the top 5 defense publications. However, my understanding is that it uses current and former intelligence operatives and analyst, including those working for the CIA, who prefer to remain anonymous and doesn't attribute its articles. For that reason, its contributors are free to express their assessments without the need to engage in the propaganda and the restrictions that would ordinarily apply, but on the other side of the equation, no doubt there is less means to verify the weight of the analysis on the basis of the credentials of an identifiable person writing the article. For that reason, I tried to give you other sources to study as well, but alas, you are more interested in engaging in nonsense and propaganda yourself.
     
  2. Iranian Monitor

    Iranian Monitor Well-Known Member

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    Going back to the F-14s:

    https://theaviationist.com/2015/03/01/iriaf-f-14s-overhauled/

    [​IMG]
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  3. NMNeil

    NMNeil Well-Known Member

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    I have to agree. Italian, Austrian, German, Belgian and Swiss small arms are the best in the world, as are the Swedish anti tank weapons. Then of course there's the British howitzers and mortars.
    So the US does buy the best equipment for the troops.
     
  4. alexa

    alexa Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    You believe a human being is healthy when it wants to be destructive. I believe it is damaged/sick. Try this.




    I said it wouldn't work. Guy MacPherson goes on about it every now and then. He wouldn't without reason. That anyone at this time could be considering war never mind nuclear war itself says a lot.
     
    Last edited: Aug 9, 2019
  5. Robert E Allen

    Robert E Allen Banned

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    The best anti tank weapon is the A-10 warthog. Any weapon that puts you in range of a tank is a bad anti tank weapon.

    As For small arms, i think you'd find that to be very subjective. I think a lot small arms today are underpowered. I'd want my troops out there with at least a .308. And the nato designations can stuff it.
     
  6. Jeannette

    Jeannette Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    What an excuse. When Washington started its attacks on Russia, Craig Roberts said that some in Washington were talking about a war and how they would be able to buy up Europe afterwards. Reminds me of Russia in the 90's, when some were given bank loans to buy up the country while the people starved, and more recently in Ukraine where the same situation is on going.

    What a difference from Nikola Tesla who invented just everything that we have today and who wanted free energy for everyone so as to end wars. He was destroyed by Morgan later on when he found out that the electricity being used wouldn't have meters - either that or maybe because he wouldn't marry his daughter.

    Anyway, after having all his patents stolen by Marconi, Edison, etc., Tesla ripped up his royalty contract with Westinghouse to help them out financially and ended up living penniless in a hotel room for 20 years.


    [​IMG]


     
  7. Jeannette

    Jeannette Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I have to laugh at Sweden having the best anti tank weapons. I wonder why? Looks like they never got over Peter the Great.





    I toot my horn and dance with glee
    when listening to the reverie
    of lands a-far. For what I know
    it's but a show - and soon they'll go.

    But not before they suffer dear
    for having poked the Russian bear - Jeannette

    [​IMG]
     
  8. Jeannette

    Jeannette Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Don't bet on it. The Chinese are proud people and have an innate hatred towards those who have insulted and harmed them for decades if not centuries. They will fight to the death if need be, and if Washington thinks differently, then they are truly stupid.
     
  9. Iranian Monitor

    Iranian Monitor Well-Known Member

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    https://www.wearethemighty.com/why-are-houthis-rebelling
    Why Houthi rebels are kicking the crap out of the world's best tank

    If you like to see more Abram tanks being destroyed by Iranian made anti-tank missiles (Tosan ATGM, Toofan ATGM, and others), just ask and I can give you literally a dozen different such video clips.
     
  10. Poohbear

    Poohbear Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    That of course can apply to any people,
    People are people - you can put the Mongol empire in that statement, or Americans, or
    the British or the Aztecs.
    Most nations have had their empires. Some more brutal than others. I think the Mongols
    killed half the Chinese population. The Indian empire won them lasting enemies. The Inca
    and Aztecs ruled with an iron fist (well, actually a stone fist.) The next great empire will be
    China, maybe. It has long been feared and hated throughout Sth East Asia.
     
  11. Robert E Allen

    Robert E Allen Banned

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    I didn't say it couldn't be done. I just said it wasn't a good way to do it.
    You should always kill your enemy at a distance they can't touch you at.
     
  12. Jeannette

    Jeannette Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I noticed that aggressive cultures are usually the ones that hate others, maybe because they couldn't conquer them, so any fear the aggressors might have would be paranoia. China has never been an aggressive nation but it does have border problems - as most nations do. Russia solved their problems with China and if the US military wasn't involved in Japan, Putin would probably give them back their islands. Russia certainly doesn't need the land - Japan does.

    Before the coup in Ukraine Putin was thinking of a trade route from Barcelona to China and was even considering giving Kaliningrad back to Germany. Merkel ruined that with the sanctions.
     
  13. Poohbear

    Poohbear Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I recall people saying that the Chinese are a peace loving people who have long looked inward
    and never sought to develop advanced weapons. I suspect that's a racist statement, along the lines
    of the other annoying one "there are no such thing as cannibals."
    A possible China empire tomorrow will be as harsh and brutal to its subjects as China is to its own
    people. We could see in SE Asia and even the Pacific the Sinicization of the people, like what is
    going on in Tibet. This is more serious than Russia's Finalization process or Vietnam's rule over
    Indochina
    But these debates aren't really about China, Russia, Vietnam etc.. I perceive they are about hate
    of ourselves. Be careful what you wish for.
     
  14. Dayton3

    Dayton3 Well-Known Member

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    The largest item in U.S. defense spending is for personnel.

    And to the OP, we don't actually know how much Russia and China spend on defense.

    Back during the Cold War the Soviet defense budget was ONLY for what it paid its soldiers. Which wasn't much. Nuclear weapons were still a spot in the budget called "machine tools".

    https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/a...pends-the-u-s-on-the-military-here-s-the-math
     
    Last edited: Aug 9, 2019
  15. Iranian Monitor

    Iranian Monitor Well-Known Member

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    The best way to get a job done, is to get it done with the available resources and in the most efficient manner possible. The reason tanks have become largely obsolete, and mostly a liability (at least in the battlefields we are seeing today), is because they can now be hit at a good distance by the equivalent of a "sniper" with an ATGM. In the process, you see the country with the 3rd largest defense budget in the world behind only the US and Russia (and spending nearly as much as the Russians do), unable to beat a rag tag Houthi force despite having all the support they need from a large coalition of forces, including the US and Britain.

    The same applies to large naval vessels as well. These vessels are quite vulnerable too. The idea that very expensive, and far more limited, anti-missile systems can effectively protect these vessels against far more numerous and less expensive missiles trying to hit them will prove wrong when the time comes to prove it. That should be no secret to the US, given what it should have learned from its most expensive war game ever, namely the Millennium 2002 challenge. But the forces that prefer money to be spend on their coffers have no interest in learning those lessons properly. And since the Millennium 2002 challenge, the advances in what a country like Iran can bring to the table to strengthen the correct tactics to make those naval vessels very much vulnerable are simply too many for me to recount here. For instance, in 2002, Iran didn't have anti-ship ballistic missiles. No other country had them at that time either. It has such weapons now. Nor did Iran have the large submarine force it has today.

    On the latter, I invite you (if possible) to just think a bit when you consider all the ways that this simple, comparatively inexpensive, mini-submarine force and its missile launching capabilities, could do to US warships when its capabilities are employed in conjunction with tens of thousands of cheap projectiles that are fired at a naval convoy in order to basically exhaust that convoy's defenses. And when this is done also in conjunction with mines that have been laid properly in a manner designed to isolate the vessels from one another. This is precisely what Iran practices every year in its naval war games, which are dismissed by some here as "propaganda". But this is no propaganda -- this are the tactics that the US will have to face and overcome in war with Iran. Tactics Iran practices only because it needs to train its personnel for carrying them out.

    In the exercise I am asking you to engage in, the "mini-submarine" by Iran is basically acting like a "sniper". The mini-sub, working in shallow waters, is not easily detectable at all. Worse for the US: when it fires its missile using the capsule system employed by Iran for this kind of operation, the launch itself takes place away from the mini-sub, meaning that its location is not revealed by the launch either. In the process, these inexpensive mini-subs and their anti-ship missiles can prove a lot more effective than any large and fancy weapons and weapons systems in the US arsenal. Just like how a fancy and expensive Abrams tank has shown to be a sitting duck against rather inexpensive modern ATGMs. With the difference: even if you take out a "sniper", the loss of life and resources on the other side is minimal. But if that "sniper" succeeds to hit its target, it will destroy things that are a lot more expensive and, more importantly, kill a lot more troops who will feel entrapped (as opposed to empowered) by their platforms.
     
  16. JessCurious

    JessCurious Well-Known Member

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    I don't know where Jeanette got the figure of 2,1141,900 "staff" for the US military. Our active duty forces consist of 471,000
    in the US Army, 184,000 Marines, 325,000 in the Navy, 323,000 in the Air Force, and 42,000 in the Coast Guard. That's a total
    of 1,347,000. In 2018, payroll and benefits in the military came to $268,000 Billion. That's a good chunk of the military budget.
    The US relies on quality or quantity for the military and that is a large part of the reason the budget is so high. Because so
    many of our personnel are in technical and support operations, our deployable force is actually fairly small. The maximum
    strength we had in Iraq was 140,000. We were substantially outnumbered by the Iraqi military - but greatly outclassed them
    in technology and quality which meant the initial invasion went pretty easily. The prolonged insurgency was a different story
    because technology didn't count as much in that kind of warfare (the majority of our casualties were caused by relatively
    low-tech IEDS (Improvised Exsplosive Devices). Iran's military numbers about 400,000, which in practical terms means any
    force we could deploy there would be heavily outnumbered. Iran has been preparing for war for years and knows that in any
    conflict with the US a land invasion is really out of the question - their military being of higher quality than Iraq's was. So they
    have been preparing for an air war with sophistcated air defenses. We would still have the edge in an air war, but it would
    likely be expense. That leaves just cruise missiles and drones. Some of these are likely to be shot down, and those that got
    through are unlikely to cause enough damage to be decisive. The Pentagon knows all these facts as well, and for these
    reasons I do not believe the US wants war with Iran. Iran has an evil government, but that doesn't mean that they are weak.
     
  17. Iranian Monitor

    Iranian Monitor Well-Known Member

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    To say Iran has an "evil government" may have some merit, but not for the reasons you seem to believe. Many of the reports you cite and supposed crimes you mention are really more in the nature propaganda and are often gross misrepresentation of facts or the case at issue. That then creates a very childish, entirely skewed, and grotesquely false image of the reality in Iran, making anyone who visits Iran immediately realize that the reality is different than the pictures being presented of Iran in the West.

    The real "evil" when it comes to Iran's government is the fact that: it is corrupt and amoral -- it doesn't stand for much of anything except to retain its power and privileges. Even those aspects of its behavior that can be characterized as 'ideological' are ultimately tied into the fact that it has built up its legitimacy and its "raison d'etre" on certain things that it cannot give up without losing much of the power base it has built over the years. Its foreign economic relations are dominated by certain mafias, infiltrated by known traitors -- people who are known to have corrupt foreign ties, but who are used by the regime to maintain its power by essentially giving foreign interests a stake in the survival of the regime, while also using these individuals as its own intermediaries to these foreign interests. Its law enforcement is equally corrupt and acts totally haphazardly and arbitrarily; archaic laws enforced in the breach, used as a vehicle to extort money from the middle and upper middle classes to pay the real salaries of the vigilante forces it caters to keep up its so-called morality police. Commercial cases, in the meantime, are also decided quite openly by corruption; the most successful lawyers not those who have honed any skills in their craft but those who are the least educated in the law and the most willing and able to deliver bribes to a judiciary that was once terribly underpaid but is now filled with millionaires and billionaires who have earned their money not by their ridiculously low nominal salaries, but through this corruption. In the process, creating a class of influential people within the regime who are most committed in not allowing any measures that would limit such corruption in any serious way.

    I can go on and on about the real failings and evil in Iran's regime. While Iran does have archaic laws that can be used to help create the propaganda image some prefer, and while some isolated cases might help paint a false picture of Iran, the real truth about Iran's government and its evil is actually quite different.
     
  18. Jeannette

    Jeannette Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    First of all you shouldn't state 'Russia' when you mean the Soviet Union, which was a globalist atheist system imposed on the Russian people first, and then on other nations. The USSR has nothing to do with the Russian Federation, and especially the way it is now with Putin.

    The Chinese system is terrible, and it will remain so as long as Washington continues its regime change policies. No nation wants to turn into another Libya, Iraq, Ukraine, and Syria. Hopefully Russia will have a beneficial affect on China and they will start giving their people more freedom. It will only happen though when Washington starts butting out of everyone's affairs.

     
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  19. Jeannette

    Jeannette Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I have to laugh at how it reminds me of Greece, where doctors would disclose incomes that were less than the heating bills on their mansions, and where buying and selling was being done in Switzerland so the government couldn't know what's going on. Their problem was that they belonged to the EU and Germany didn't like it. So they destroyed them.

    I mentioned Greece because my grandson gave me a book on Iran by an Englishman living there. When I read it I laughed and said they're just like Greeks. He said that's why he gave it to me.

    I guess that's what happens when you live in close proximity for 3 thousand years.
     
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  20. Jeannette

    Jeannette Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    According to Fort Russ, the information is from the Global Firepower 2019 index.
     
  21. JessCurious

    JessCurious Well-Known Member

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    I liked your second paragraph, but disagree with the first one. Internationally respect organizations such as Amnesty International
    and Human Rights Watch have repeatedly denounced Iran for its Human Rights abuses. Amnesty International says that Iran has
    the highest per capita execution rate of any country in the World (507 in 2018), and below only China in the actual number of
    executions. Amnesty International has reported that in 2018, 26 people were killed by the government during demonstrations and
    over 7,000 peope were arrested (at least 9 of whom died under mysterious circumstances while in police custody). Amnesty
    International has reported that in 1988, the Iranian government executed between 4,000 and 5,000 political prisoners without
    trial and buried them in scattered mass graves (Amnesty has identified the locations of 70 of these mass graves and estimates
    there are about 50 more sites - the issue was raised because many of these sites have become informal memorial areas were
    families commorate missing family members, to prevent this the Iranian government has recently undertaken an effort to disguise
    these sites and more thoroughly conceal them. See https://www.amnestyusa.org/press/Irans-year-of-shame-more-than-7000-
    arrested-in-chilling-crackdown-on-dissent-during-2018/. And, amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/06/iran.desecrating-mass-grave-
    site-would-destroy-crucial-forensic-evidence/.
     
  22. Poohbear

    Poohbear Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I don't see much difference between Soviet Marxist empiricism and Russian nationalism.
    There's difference, but on a practical level, not much. Just see how Russia is slowly
    absorbing or imposing its will on former Soviet nations.
    If you say America is seeking "regime change" in China you need to back that statement
    with facts.
    As for "butting out of everyone's affairs" America did that prior to WWI and WWII. Those
    affairs came home to the Americas, and everyone else in the world. I am fine with America
    policing Western ideals - if America doesn't, who does? If America doesn't then the world
    will once again just get picked off, one country at a time, ie China taking Taiwan, Indo
    China, Phillipines, Malaysia etc.. And Russia "absorbing" Finland, Ukraine, even Poland
    again.
     
  23. Iranian Monitor

    Iranian Monitor Well-Known Member

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    I know Iran much better than you would know from any report by Amnesty International, whose reports are always tainted by what it is fed by those who have their own agendas and who doesn't have the means (or even the real interest) to verify their accuracy.

    That said, the reports that relate to what happened in 1988, in the last year of the Iran-Iraq war when the MEK had openly joined Saddam (with the MEK fighting alongside Iraqi forces against Iranian troops) isn't without basis. In the atmosphere of that time, when most Iranians felt no sympathy for that group whatsoever (a cultist group who were engaged in terrorist acts on top of their treachery), many suspected MEK members and collaborators were indeed rounded up -- and many of those in custody were indeed summarily executed. And while the regime in Iran has actually become a lot more sophisticated since then, dealing with other episodes were its authority was challenged in far more nuanced ways (both in 2009 and 2018 ), what I have taken issue with isn't the willingness of the regime to do whatever it takes to retain its grip on power. That is pretty much a given. Rather, it is the unwillingness of those groups who oppose the regime to recognize the simple fact that they actually face a regime that is a lot more sophisticated, and in many ways a lot more effective, in dealing with dissent (and letting dissent vent off when it is not actually a real threat), than what you find in dictatorships around the world. It is also in the penchant to try to twist facts of various cases to make polemical reports about Iran "executing homosexuals" and a lot of such nonsense.

    In the process, a country where the majority of its people are indeed dissatisfied with their government/regime, aren't offered anything in the "opposition" from outside the regime which at all speaks to their real grievances -- and what feeds them. Which is why, despite tens of millions of Iranians being connected to the internet, the social media, and hundreds of satellite channels from outside beaming all sorts of anti-regime messages, no voice has emerged to rally even a significant proportion of the population in its direction; and the one time there was even a serious challenge to the regime it came from a faction within it (i.e., the 2009 demonstrations in the wake of the presidential election that year). If there is a majority in Iran that can be organized against the regime, it won't be by focusing on Iran's "nuclear program", on its support for Hezbollah, or the exaggerated (and sometimes quite false) reports about the "human rights" situation in Iran. These aren't the real grievances of the large majority of people in Iran, not even the westernized classes (such as the ones I come from) who do have sympathy for the voices that fight against some of the mandatory Hejab laws but who are otherwise quite aware that the reality in Iran isn't the joke that is presented outside.
     
    Last edited: Aug 10, 2019
  24. NMNeil

    NMNeil Well-Known Member

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  25. Robert E Allen

    Robert E Allen Banned

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