Was just watching Jack Ryan Season 3 and seeing the display of force and their movements causes some interesting dissonance given what we know now.
Could be worse OP, could be a movie about the North Koreans successfully invading America, you know, North Korea, a country that barely has a navy and who’s Air Force is mostly old Migs from several decades ago, a country who starts threatening their neighbors whenever their food supply runs low because their chubby leader eats too much while the rest of the country is at famine levels of hunger.
At least the original version of the movie was against the Russians while they were a super power.
There’s also the video game series, Homefront, where a unified Korea under northern rule invaded the US and occupies it.
I get your point, I really do, but Homefront was also about the economic collapse of the American system caused by its own corruption.
I always got the idea that Korea wasn’t incredibly overpowered united, but America was already broken and a step away from being conquered already and the first army to invade happened to be Korea. The rest of the world just wanted to see what would happen.
Kind of like having Russia invade Ukraine only to have it’s nose beaten in and globally embarrassed. Doesn’t mean Ukraine is going to invade and conquer, just that a global super power can be defeated by a smaller united nation after decades of corruption.
At least that’s the idea that got me through the game. It was honestly just a COD reskin of a game and wasn’t actually that good in retrospect
I knew nothing about the game because it did not interest me, but that’s some interesting world-building.
You didn’t miss anything that most other triple A games covered. If they focused more on story instead of shoehorning a terrible multiplayer pvp it could have been decent
a country that barely has a navy
North Korea has the largest submarine fleet of any nation. Of course most of those are old diesel subs, but the point still stands.
According to the documentary Down Periscope, a nuclear sub is no match for a diesel sub with a misfit crew.
The US Navy wouldn’t last a week
What a terrible demotion for Kelsey Grammer, from Starfleet to submarines.
Diesel subs have some advantages over others, some distinct disadvantages too, but a few advantages
Every time this movie comes up, I feel obligated to point out that despite being under occupation by
ChinaNorth Korea - Subway is somehow still open with uniformed staff and a well stocked sandwich bar, all while having dine-in customers for convenient ad placement..Ad placement that, get this: goes as far to even have the characters use the official ‘Sandwich Artist’ job title while robbing them ಠ_ಠ
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At least the original version of the movie was against the Russians
You’re forgetting the real beef behind that invasion: Nicaragua.
I thought it was a North Korean movie for propaganda reasons, turns out it’s an American movie 😭
Wasn’t russia also a part of the remake? I vaguely remember that movie and can’t recall much other than a mustang with a m134 or some goofy shit like that.
Rewatching Stargate and international cooperation feels so strange and bereft somehow. A kinder path.
I often times wonder if an extraterrestrial threat would be a unifying factor or if people would still be selfish unless it affected them. The pandemic was the closest we’ve seen to a world level threat recently and it just increased selfishness IMO (at least in the US)
I thought Marvel’s Secret Invasion had an interesting quote on this that I’ll paraphrase: nothing makes humans stronger than uniting against a common enemy, but as soon as that enemy is gone, they always devolve into tribal bickering again. It’ll be a miracle if we ever reach Star Trek levels of global unification and peace.
Don’t forget that Star Trek universe went through an apocalyptic phase before reaching their post scarcity society. I’m quite optimistic that we’ll reach Star Trek levels of peace, but reaching that state without having 90% of the population annihilated in some kind of a World War or some other catastrophe? That’s what I’m kinda pessimistic about.
Never mind Star Trek, at the rate we’re going we’ll be lucky to get The Expanse.
I mean, we’ve already surpassed The Expanse in some ways (at least the first couple books).
Something that struck me was in Caliban’s War they were relying heavily on mirrors to focus sunlight for growing crops out at Jupiter. I guess the authors just didn’t foresee LED technology advancing as rapidly as it did.
Leviathan Wakes was published in June 2011. Caliban’s War was published in June 2012.
The L-prize “60W” category winner was announced in August 2011 (it was Philips). It didn’t become commercially-available until April 2012, but even then, it was like $50 – far from affordable for most people. Now you can get equivalent or better bulbs for less than 1/10th of that.
but as soon as that enemy is gone, they always devolve into tribal bickering again.
The EU.
The aliens would just hack the internet and flood it with bots more advanced than ChatGPT faking support to surrender to the alien overlord, then sit their asses watching humanity fought among themselves.
IMO I don’t think humanity would unite. Some people would force their families to surrender to the aliens because they fear for their own lives, others would try to bargain with them for technology. Others would help the aliens simply because they hate humanity. We really can’t count on anything to unite us, and I don’t even think uniting the species should be our common goal. People are too individualistic and diverse for that, and unity would take away what it means to be human.
If aliens can reach us, they aren’t a threat. They either kill us without any issue or they don’t want to. There is no fighting back against it.
I do think it’d be interesting to see what happens if we do discovery alien life, particularly of the intelligent variety. So many religions are based on the assumption humans are the only intelligent life, and that earth is that place that can support it. Do they mostly all collapse, or do they evolve? Do people finally recognize the stupidity? It’d be fun to see.
That’s not necessarily true. If aliens do visit us, they might not be able to wipe us out at all. There’s really no way to say that other races would be capable of wiping us out, because they might not understand the concept of war in the first place.
They’re either capable of wiping us out or they aren’t a threat. Either way, not a threat.
Which religion has the assumption that we are the only intelligent life? The ones I have studied didn’t seem to believe that only human intelligence is around. They had demons and angles and gods.
It’s at least heavily implied in many. It implies that he created everything and all living things on it only talks about creatures being created on earth. If the book is accurate (it’s clearly not, but let’s assume) and if it’s divinely inspired, it should be aware of cresting life elsewhere also. It also calls stars/glalaxies/nebulas/whatever “lights in the dome of the sky” so not exactly a great start for it.
It being weird or wrong hasn’t stopped it really before though, but it would probably create some kind of shift, especially if it’s intelligent. In that case, are they deserving the same status as man? Are they children of God also? Why do they look different?
Christians don’t even care what the Bible says let alone what it implies.
If we’re comparing to human history, the Aztecs weren’t singlehandedly defeated by the Spanish. The conquistadors had plenty of assistance of other nations that wanted to see the Aztecs gone. We all know what happened afterwards, but even if you went back in time you wouldn’t convince a single Tlaxcala warrior that their newfound awesome ally against their sworn enemy was actually the “bad guy” - until much later, that is.
So, if the aliens started an attack against whoever the superpower happens to be, they would have plenty of assistance as well. It’s human nature.
Meh I would have sided with the Spainards as well. It can’t be fun having to hand over hunks of your population each year to be given to the sun god.
Ozymandias, is it you?
Depends on so many factors. Sometimes the external enemy doesn’t unite people at all. Sometimes it becomes a race of who can suck up to them so when the war is over they can run things. Traitors and collaboration.
Also I am betting if there was a threat it would be over in hours. As they hit us with a million nukes while our governments spend the last few minutes wondering why we pointed out best gear at each other instead of up.
Or heck they could be creative and just block out our sun for a decade and use bunker busting bombs looking for infrared to kill off the stranglers. That way they have a nice non-nuclear wasteland to work with.
Nah, if that’s the goal they’ll just use Neutrino Bombs (look them up, they’re crazy what they’re designed to do)
I saw a discussion about this once and they argued that they didn’t have the range leaving all the rural people still around. Plus the humans who are in nuclear proof bunkers/submarines have nukes to get revenge when you land.
Blocking the sun works better. You can’t just hide from the earth freezing. Even if you survive somehow you are giving away your location via infared. Also, you could still have some functional ecosystem left with the plants and animals that can withstand a true hibernation and the deep sea life.
It’s also surreal (for a different reason), to hear lines like
Why attack Russia? Aren’t they our friends now?
from Terminator 2.
On the other hand, the Simpsons did a not-so-funny-now with this:
Still pretty funny.
Seeing more than one tank on the red square feels surreal now
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Modern Warfare 2/3 where Russia not only manages to successfully invade the US, but brings it to it’s knees.
Even if you set aside the fact that the US has the world’s most powerful military and a heavily armed civilian population, geographically it would be virtually impossible to invade from another continent.
But fiction is fiction. And the Modern warfare trilogy was outstanding.
I think the Swiss population might be more heavily armed in the sense of “percent of people with a military-grade weapon”
“Number of military-grade weapons per person” is almost certainly the US, but guns being primarily fetish items / personality markers in the US means the distribution is very top heavy.
Getting into a random house and found guns to loot was the most realistic part of the Russian invasion plot in MW2.
Well how else do you justify maintaining defense spending at 5x the next biggest military? You need a boogeyman to keep the nation spending like WW2 never ended.
Now I’m hearing there isn’t enough money for Medicare or social security…
I was just thinking that as I was reading this post. Yeah, so they’re not “right behind the US” in overall ability and preparedness, and NOW they’re drained financially and their populations morale is at a low point with the drafts and the prisoner-units, who else do we have all these guns for then? Who will be the next boogeyman, and have we already laid the groundwork to say it’s China?
The next boogeyman is definitely going to be China. But with their looming demography crisis, it’ll be quite unpredictable how’s the world geopolitical state going to be in 20-30 years. For all we know some country like India or Indonesia managed to solve their internal corruption and be a superpower.
India … solve internal corruption
It’s too early to be laughing this hard.
Y’all seem to be forgetting the “axis of evil” — the justification conservatives used to double military industrial complex spending, the last time they faced cost cutting…
Only a fool would disregard the formidable economic powerhouses of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea!
TL;DR they have successfully manufactured boogeymen as needed. Realistic adversaries are unnecessary.
Its the ametican way
Stargate thinks the Russians could get a gate up and running lmao
I watched Red Dawn the other day.
Y’all were some paranoid mfs in the 80s.
The “they want to invade us” aspect feels more real than ever. The “they credibly threatened our independence” aspect feels less real than ever.
Russia under Putin is somehow both a worse neighbor and a less credible threat on the world stage.
Agreed, russia has proven themselves more dangerous, and more laughable at the same time. Their ability to underhandedly destroy us from within is far stronger than we ever were allowed to believe. Their ability to mount an actual attack, is far more laughable than we thought.
Though I do suppose the real scary part of it is. The potential death throws kind of attack. Putin’s immaturity, narcissism etc… is far scarier than we have ever understood. Russia quite frankly is the superpower that I could easily see hit the point of “If I can’t run the world, I’ll destroy it so you can’t have it”, and quite simply we’ve never seen or understood the potential of Nuke vs Anti-Nuke warfare.
I was in the Air Force in the late 70s. Worked in the flight surgeon’s office, so if anything went down on the flight line, we were there.
If you wanna see Kegels In Action, watch what happens when many many gallons of JP-4 gets spilled on nukes inside a B-52D on the alert pad.
Fun times!
By far the funniest part of that movie was fucking Nicaragua’s involvement, not the Soviets’. Shit worked, too - I knew many conservatives back in the '80s who genuinely thought Nicaragua was a threat to invade us.
Also prety dumb with our own geography. Starting an invasuon via colorodo
It’s important to have a powerful enemy, otherwise why would the US pay for an $800 billion per year military?
now US need to tell that cuba or mexico is the powerful enemy idk
Lol Cuba can’t even afford bullets for military training.
if they pretend to have training, it’s enough to be more powerful than russia lol
“To preserve our empire” is the honest subtextual answer.
We have always been at war with Eurasia.
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That wasn’t Russia, it was the Soviet Union.
Also it was very stupid, ineffective and had allies.
This is such a popular misconception I really don’t understand. Russia was so entirely dependant on the US for their logistics in WW2 it’s shocking how little it’s talked about. They were supplied American food and trucks in mass. Without the help of American supplies Hitler would of beaten Russia. Then once the Western front was more of a threat the Russians were able to surge forward with their mass of bodies and utter disregard for casualties.
The Russian army has always been a joke. Brutality and lack of regard for human life is their strength. Theyre like the big dumb fat kid who bullies people in school. You get in a real fight with em and it quickly becomes obvious they haven’t ever done cardio (logistics, supplies) and there’s very little muscle mass (technology) hiding behind the fat layer (overblown specs and lies about capabilities).
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Well technically the Soviet Union but you could try starting with operation Bagration and the battle of Berlin
It’s not reading material, but WWII In Color is an amazing documentary that covers the entire war, all fronts, all nations, and most major battles. It also covers the Holocaust and concentration camps, which is a horrific nightmare to see with your own eyes.
The USSR that was massively propped up and kept in the fight thanks to the absurd volume of war materiel being pumped in by Britain and America?
A general disregard for numbers of casualties, an almost complete lack of maintenance capability for heavy vehicles, and unimaginative tactics relying primarily on overwhelming numbers and firepower might have ground down the resource starved Nazis, but it would have been a very different story against the Allies.
The Russians didn’t defeat the Nazis, they stopped their advance. While this was critical for the eventual defeat of the Nazis, it is not the same thing. The Nazis were defending against advances from Allied forces along 3 flanks, while stopped-dead against the 4th in Russia. The Russians also lost 1.5 million people in the battle for Lennongrad and were almost out of supplies. The wouldn’t budge because it was their absolute last stand. By the end of that battle Russian soldiers were reporting to the lines without weapons or boots, and picking up both from the guy in front of them when he was killed. It was a horrific nightmare of a situation. It was a critical victory against the Nazis, but not their ultimate defeat. The Nazis were defeated when the western forces advanced on Berlin and Hitler killed himself rather than be captured.
I would like to make one correction. Berlin didn’t fall because the Western forces captured it, but it was in fact the Red Army that got there first. This of course doesn’t change the fact that the Soviets never would have managed it by themselves, but this is the reason why claiming “the Soviets defeated the Nazis” is technically true.
Getting there first means you get credit for winning the whole war?
They were on the winning side, so they did win the whole war. But as I said, they didn’t do it alone nor would they ever have been able to win without all the help they received from everyone else fighting the Nazis at the same time. I don’t think current events should be a reason to see history differently. The Soviets were a powerful war machine during WWII and their contribution played a huge role in the outcome of that war.
These are the rules, finders keepers.
Thanks for the correction.
The Russia that did almost loose to the Nazis and only won because of bad weather and gigantic help?
I recently saw the Rambo movies for the first time, and yeah I laughed about how they portrayed the russians.
Really goes to show that perception management is an effective strategy as long as thats all you do.
Yeah, but isn’t that American propaganda?
We needed a bbg to justify our actions. I’m not saying it was out of nowhere, but the scale of the thing certainly played well for certain politicians.
I’m old enough to remember when movies like ‘Firefox’ and ‘The Hunt For Red October’ first came out.
The US was always miles ahead of the Soviets. It was so bad that during the Reagan Era the Right had to come up with a new metric that let the Reds look tougher than they were. “Throw weight” was the measure of how big a load an ICBM could carry. Because the Russians had inferior tech, they had to build bigger missiles. Kind of how a 1700’s musket had a higher caliber than an M-16. It was actually a symbol of soviet inferiority, but you’ll hear people talking about it to this day.
And here come all the angry tankies
Just how powerful was soviet Russia in its heyday compared to today? Without allies, was it ever a true threat?
Yes. Yes it was. The USSR has very little in common with kleptocracy Russia. My wife was raised under their educational system and she was studying organic chemistry in the eight grade. Today she is one of the top people in her field (easily top ten) and she says that most of her career she’s mostly leaned on her early education. Especially math and science.
It is wild to see this. It’s amazing how quickly things change.
Yeah, Russia was incredibly powerful in its heyday, both in global influence and military power. Think about how people are worried about climate change now, then double it. That was the threat of nuclear war that kept people awake at night for decades.
After the time of the collapse we found out how empty a lot of their power was. How much of their achievements were less an unstoppable train and more of a rocket that couldn’t be refueled. They had power but they never figured out how to make it sustainable.
How much of their achievements were less an unstoppable train and more of a rocket that couldn’t be refueled.
Love the analogy. I’m aware they were and still are a threat from a nuclear perspective. I was just more curious about their ability to successfully mount a tactical battle strategy, logistics to supply said strategy, etc.
To a degree that was shown in the hot parts of the Cold War like the Vietnam War or the Congo Crisis where they provided logistical support. Like the US, or more accurately as a counter to them, they fiddled with countries for years to get outcomes that benefited the USSR ideology.
You could argue that it’s easier to shake up someone else than lead a full invasion force, but the US has learned that lesson too and followed that same play book. Invasion is harder than giving someone the tools to destroy themselves.
Remember that the USSR included not just Russians but Ukrainians.
Yes, but Ukraine was not the military power it is today from my understanding.
IIRC, the Soviets placed their primary artillery school and tank factories in Ukraine. As a percentage of the USSR’s military base, the Ukrainians were well above average.
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In its heyday under Peter / Catherine the Great, depending on who you ask, Russia was a true world superpower. Richest royals, biggest population, massive food supply.
In the 50s and 60s, if the nuclear deterrent hadn’t existed they could have taken over most of Europe through a combination of capture of democracy and invasion.
Even after than, Russian hard-science education was extremely good (biology they got screwed by ideology).
On the other hand, it does make the player character in certain Modern Warfare/Battlefield single player campaigns mowing down Russian mooks by the dozens seem a bit more realistic 😅
