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China, in it's modern incarnation, and every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle. Nothing. No one has any rank that has bearing

China, in it's modern incarnation, and every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle. Nothing. No one has any rank that has bearing on any kind of combat. Just decades of self-congratulatory war games. China has tons of weapons and resources. But it would remain to be seen if they can actually fight when every single person along the entire chain is a total day one rookie.

estearum 3mo ago
NATO exercises and, ya know, the war in Iran, seem to suggest there's limited applicability of the US's experience.
- ericmay 3mo ago
  Dropping bombs and evading live anti-aircraft fire is of limited applicability? Are you sure you're not confusing combined arms exercises that the US has, and continues to engage in (Venezuela comes to mind recently) with your personal opinion on the validity of the war in Iran?
  - mplewis 3mo ago
    brother, how do you think this is going for us
    - ericmay 3mo ago
      I think that's a separate question from the validity of real-life combat experience that American (and other) forces are gaining that Chinese forces lack, with respect to the OP.
      - estearum 3mo ago
        The claim above is that neither side has experience that's all that relevant to the type of conflict we'd expect in a China/US conflict. Nothing to do with "validity." Your lived experience (or whoever's you're defending) is valid.
        ericmay 3mo ago
        That is factually incorrect then if that's the claim. The US has that experience.
        estearum 3mo ago
        No active American servicemember has fought a near-peer adversary lmao You should do some reading from the people who fought in GWOT and are now volunteering in Ukraine. Obviously combat experience is better than no combat experience, but we absolutely should not assume much beyond that.
        ericmay 3mo ago
        > No active American servicemember has fought a near-peer adversary lmao You don't need to fight China to get experience fighting. The skills and experience translate. Plus America is getting direct experience with Chinese and Russian made systems. Even the simple act of organizing and deploying the military is incredibly valuable as I've already explained to you in another post.
        estearum 3mo ago
        US Marine talking about Ukraine: “I just think that foreign fighters came here and got a war… a type of warfare that they didn’t expect,” he said. “Especially American foreign fighters. It’s not Afghanistan. It’s not Iraq. You’re taking the side of Vietnam versus the U.S. over here. You are the underdog, and with no air superiority or anything. And so they just assume they were being used as cannon fodder. But that’s just the way this war is. It’s a nightmare.” Yes, obviously having experience deploying the military, or driving cars, or fixing tanks, or evacuating casualties, is all far better than no experience doing those things. Do you think someone is disagreeing with you on this point?
        ericmay 3mo ago
        Circling back to where this began... > The claim above is that neither side has experience that's all that relevant to the type of conflict we'd expect in a China/US conflict. This is a factually incorrect statement. I'm not sure why you're confused about what you are agreeing or disagreeing with at this point.
  - estearum 3mo ago
    Uhh yes. I am sure. A smash and grab in Venezuela is not Iran and Iran is not China. The closest analog we have to war with China is Ukraine/Russia. All evidence from NATO exercises and investigations is that Ukr/Rus conflict has virtually no relevance to OEF, OIF, or The Caracas Kidnapping. Iran is a little taste of what's going in Ukr/Rus, but obviously China would be able to wield the same type of war at orders of magnitude greater intensity. My comment was quite specific on my claim. You have provided zero evidence against it, and instead are just doing this weird presumptive ad hominem thing? If you were paying attention to what's actually going on in modern battlefields, you'd know that in fact you're right: "dropping bombs and evading AA fire" is actually of limited applicability! Great examples! There are no bombs being dropped. Virtually no humans are being shot at with anti-aircraft fire. That's what I'm pointing out.
    - ericmay 3mo ago
      Ok so let me explain something to you as I think you might be a little new to the military or military theory, combat, &c. Militaries need to train in order to test systems, test weapons, gain experience, and be able to generally perform better and accomplish any given objective. In the modern era, militaries need to engage in what is called Combined Arms exercises. These exercises, as the name alludes to, coordinate activities across different branches of the military. So it might be the army coordinating with the navy to attack a target or capture some piece of land or objective. Maybe the army is on the ground directing fire from naval ships off the coast, or it could be the Air Force providing drone coverage as special forces achieve some mission. Coordinating these activities during peace time is a key function of successful militaries. It is incredibly important to align these activities to be effective. Because of this, not only do you have militaries that work on combined arms and other trainings internally, but in the case of NATO, or perhaps the US with alliances in the Pacific we also engage in combined arms exercises with other militaries to further enhance and integrate those capabilities so that when it comes time to fight, forces have been trained how to respond and can do so more effectively. A great example of this is KATUSA - Korean Augmentation to the United States Army where Korean soldiers are actually assigned to and reporting to American military command and train alongside the United States. The reason Venezuela is important, for example, is because it was an exercise demonstrating combined arms coordination and execution. It shows what the US military is actually capable when air, sea, and land forces engage to accomplish some objective. So why is this important re: Iran (and Ukraine certainly). Because it's combined arms activities except that it's the real thing. Real equipment failures might happen, real lessons are learned, you are actually getting shot at. Lives are at stake. The military is actually battle tested, even if the opponent is hopelessly outmatched. So when you write something like this: > All evidence from NATO exercises and investigations is that Ukr/Rus conflict has virtually no relevance to OEF, OIF, or The Caracas Criminal Apprehension. Those exercises, the lessons learned from the wars such as OEF, OIF, and even how Ukraine is today using and testing American military equipment in battle, matter a whole lot. And that's one of Xi Jingping's primary concerns with his military. They have done 0 of this. They've never really been shot at. They haven't tested their equipment in any sort of real battle. For the software-minded, it's like they've always been in development and haven't even touched a preview environment, let alone production. And worrying enough the US has demonstrated the capability to bypass and/or destroy Chinese and Russian military equipment including air defense and radar arrays - this is worrisome for those countries. If it comes time for a real war, well the only evidence you have so far is your state of the art equipment or close enough to it was absolutely fucking useless when it came to operations involving the US. Whooops. They may start a war and find out they made a lot of bad assumptions and didn't train well enough and then what? I'd encourage you to think about this a little more than you are here.
cumshitpiss 3mo ago
[dead]
input_sh 3mo ago
This isn't WW1, not a lot of experience is necessary to point a missile or a drone towards the target.
- groomlake 3mo ago
  You could also reduce WW1 to “pointing your rifle towards the target.”
- _heimdall 3mo ago
  You may overestimate the skill demanded of soldiers in trench warfare. The mental and physical ability to stay in the fight is unimaginable. The skill expected with regards to attacking the enemy, well the goal was mostly to just not stick your head above the trench wall.
nemothekid 3mo ago
I'm not sure that any of that actually matters. Wars are not Call of Duty. It's politically difficult to invest actual manpower in Iran and Unless China were to nuke Hawaii, an all out war with China would also immediately be politically unpopular. China, like Iran, wouldn't doesn't need to defeat the US, they just need to hold out long enough for the US economy to collapse, which would happen way faster if China is the opposition. The only reason we don't have $6 gas right now is because of a ton of financially engineering. I don't know how anyone could convince the American public that $10 gas and war time rations is worth defending Taiwan.
- tintor 3mo ago
  > The only reason we don't have $6 gas right now ... I see you are not in California.
  - FuriouslyAdrift 3mo ago
    California has both very high taxes on gas and a custom formulation that is only used in California... which is just about the most Californian thing I can think of.
    - hollerith 3mo ago
      The atmosphere of coastal California (i.e., where most Californians live) has about one tenth the capacity to dilute pollutants as the atmosphere of most of the rest of the US (because inversions are common especially in the summer). Air quality in coastal Southern California was awful back when California used the same gas the rest of the country did.
- _heimdall 3mo ago
  I'm curious what the financial engineering you're referring to was. I've been trying to understand why gas is still comparatively cheap given the war and the best I've landed on so far is that the spread between feedstock (crude oil) and output (diesel, gas, jet fuel, etc) widened in large part die to flooding the market with strategic oil reserves. We keep crude prices low, which is what many indicators track, while we couldn't keep final product prices low as easily because we can't quickly increase refinery capacity. How did they financially suppress fuel prices?
freehorse 3mo ago
> China, in it's modern incarnation, and every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle. I wish people would take a short stop here and contemplate a bit on this sentence.
- bitmasher9 3mo ago
  All of this talk about entering a hot war with China is crazy because of this fact. You don’t go directly from literally zero battles to starting a war with one of the strongest armies.
  - owebmaster 3mo ago
    How long it takes for an army to have zero experience to be heavily experienced? 1 year? 3 years? 5 years? Can their enemies win before that?
    - bitmasher9 3mo ago
      Probably 5+ years. Institutions learn slowly, especially top down institutions like militaries and governments. The Ukraine war is 4+ years old, and they are still making significant improvements on their tactics. This is with support and advice from experienced militaries like US and France.
- glaslong 3mo ago
  Goals tbh
  - scarecrowbob 3mo ago
    Seriously.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- linkregister 3mo ago
  The PLA has engaged in many battles over the last few decades. There were some as recent as 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army#Engagements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army#Eng...
close04 3mo ago
> China, in it's modern incarnation, and every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle. Nothing. No one has any rank that has bearing on any kind of combat. Just decades of self-congratulatory war games. Ukraine wasn't really wearing the war crown either and they managed to redefine the face of war to the point where countries with trillion dollar militaries are taking notes. Your jab isn't totally unwarranted, China like most countries has no battle tested military. But your correct premise suggests a conclusion which just isn't there. If I say "China hasn't lost a war in decades, while the US is successfully losing to an enemy that's been strangled from all sides for decades" the premise is true but the conclusion is still up for being written.
rootsudo 3mo ago
Vs, the unities which has lost its engagement since.. the Vietnam or Korean war? Don’t get me wrong, I’m pro-American all the way. I just am not sure which is better: to defer and not be in war or to be in war and lose due to economics vs brute firepower/manpower/superiority.
rightbyte 3mo ago
In "actual fighting" the losses are such that the units are weakened not like leveling up experience. I don't think soldiers survive any meaningful amount of combat to get experience in combat. Pooping without WC is what they get good at which you can do in exerciss too. Logistics and support staff might get experience maybe ...
kfse 3mo ago
Didn't at least some living generals fight in Vietnam?
- importantbrian 3mo ago
  For the US? No. The mandatory retirement age is 64. The fall of Saigon was 1975. So the youngest you could be to have served in Vietnam is 69. The last general with Vietnam experience retired in 2010.
  - kfse 3mo ago
    No for China. Apparently Zhang Youxia was one with combat experience in Vietnam but got purged recently.
SmirkingRevenge 3mo ago
I think this comes out in the wash mostly. While we're going to have lots of officers who've been to war for a while yet, turnover eventually evens the playing field. The people who would be doing the actual fighting in a war today have never been to war. And as we've seen in Ukraine, warfare is always evolving, making some subset of past war experience less valuable.
- WarmWash 3mo ago
  The upper ranks of the US military is absolutely littered with guys who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its the difference between having a CEO who was a competent engineer for years before becoming the CEO, and having a CEO who went to business school and played software dev tycoon for 10 years before walking in the door to be CEO on the first day of their first real job.
nixon_why69 3mo ago
This is a big deal for infantry forces but I suspect rather less for air and missile forces. If anything, US pilots might be unequipped psychologically to deal with anything newer than 50yo MiGs.
hollerith 3mo ago
Good point, but China's generals were trained by generals with experience in a proper war, which is not nothing. Specifically, Beijing sent 3 million Chinese soldiers to assist Pyongyang in evicting the US Army and its allies from North Korea. An invasion of Taiwan would entail a large naval component, though, and China really has zero experience in naval warfare even if you accept my assertion that there would be some value in having admirals trained by admirals trained by admirals with experience in a proper war.
gbuk2013 3mo ago
> every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle How I wish for a world where the same could be said for every other army!

estearum 3mo ago

NATO exercises and, ya know, the war in Iran, seem to suggest there's limited applicability of the US's experience.

ericmay 3mo ago
Dropping bombs and evading live anti-aircraft fire is of limited applicability? Are you sure you're not confusing combined arms exercises that the US has, and continues to engage in (Venezuela comes to mind recently) with your personal opinion on the validity of the war in Iran?
- mplewis 3mo ago
  brother, how do you think this is going for us
  - ericmay 3mo ago
    I think that's a separate question from the validity of real-life combat experience that American (and other) forces are gaining that Chinese forces lack, with respect to the OP.
    - estearum 3mo ago
      The claim above is that neither side has experience that's all that relevant to the type of conflict we'd expect in a China/US conflict. Nothing to do with "validity." Your lived experience (or whoever's you're defending) is valid.
      - ericmay 3mo ago
        That is factually incorrect then if that's the claim. The US has that experience.
        estearum 3mo ago
        No active American servicemember has fought a near-peer adversary lmao You should do some reading from the people who fought in GWOT and are now volunteering in Ukraine. Obviously combat experience is better than no combat experience, but we absolutely should not assume much beyond that.
        ericmay 3mo ago
        > No active American servicemember has fought a near-peer adversary lmao You don't need to fight China to get experience fighting. The skills and experience translate. Plus America is getting direct experience with Chinese and Russian made systems. Even the simple act of organizing and deploying the military is incredibly valuable as I've already explained to you in another post.
        estearum 3mo ago
        US Marine talking about Ukraine: “I just think that foreign fighters came here and got a war… a type of warfare that they didn’t expect,” he said. “Especially American foreign fighters. It’s not Afghanistan. It’s not Iraq. You’re taking the side of Vietnam versus the U.S. over here. You are the underdog, and with no air superiority or anything. And so they just assume they were being used as cannon fodder. But that’s just the way this war is. It’s a nightmare.” Yes, obviously having experience deploying the military, or driving cars, or fixing tanks, or evacuating casualties, is all far better than no experience doing those things. Do you think someone is disagreeing with you on this point?
        ericmay 3mo ago
        Circling back to where this began... > The claim above is that neither side has experience that's all that relevant to the type of conflict we'd expect in a China/US conflict. This is a factually incorrect statement. I'm not sure why you're confused about what you are agreeing or disagreeing with at this point.
- estearum 3mo ago
  Uhh yes. I am sure. A smash and grab in Venezuela is not Iran and Iran is not China. The closest analog we have to war with China is Ukraine/Russia. All evidence from NATO exercises and investigations is that Ukr/Rus conflict has virtually no relevance to OEF, OIF, or The Caracas Kidnapping. Iran is a little taste of what's going in Ukr/Rus, but obviously China would be able to wield the same type of war at orders of magnitude greater intensity. My comment was quite specific on my claim. You have provided zero evidence against it, and instead are just doing this weird presumptive ad hominem thing? If you were paying attention to what's actually going on in modern battlefields, you'd know that in fact you're right: "dropping bombs and evading AA fire" is actually of limited applicability! Great examples! There are no bombs being dropped. Virtually no humans are being shot at with anti-aircraft fire. That's what I'm pointing out.
  - ericmay 3mo ago
    Ok so let me explain something to you as I think you might be a little new to the military or military theory, combat, &c. Militaries need to train in order to test systems, test weapons, gain experience, and be able to generally perform better and accomplish any given objective. In the modern era, militaries need to engage in what is called Combined Arms exercises. These exercises, as the name alludes to, coordinate activities across different branches of the military. So it might be the army coordinating with the navy to attack a target or capture some piece of land or objective. Maybe the army is on the ground directing fire from naval ships off the coast, or it could be the Air Force providing drone coverage as special forces achieve some mission. Coordinating these activities during peace time is a key function of successful militaries. It is incredibly important to align these activities to be effective. Because of this, not only do you have militaries that work on combined arms and other trainings internally, but in the case of NATO, or perhaps the US with alliances in the Pacific we also engage in combined arms exercises with other militaries to further enhance and integrate those capabilities so that when it comes time to fight, forces have been trained how to respond and can do so more effectively. A great example of this is KATUSA - Korean Augmentation to the United States Army where Korean soldiers are actually assigned to and reporting to American military command and train alongside the United States. The reason Venezuela is important, for example, is because it was an exercise demonstrating combined arms coordination and execution. It shows what the US military is actually capable when air, sea, and land forces engage to accomplish some objective. So why is this important re: Iran (and Ukraine certainly). Because it's combined arms activities except that it's the real thing. Real equipment failures might happen, real lessons are learned, you are actually getting shot at. Lives are at stake. The military is actually battle tested, even if the opponent is hopelessly outmatched. So when you write something like this: > All evidence from NATO exercises and investigations is that Ukr/Rus conflict has virtually no relevance to OEF, OIF, or The Caracas Criminal Apprehension. Those exercises, the lessons learned from the wars such as OEF, OIF, and even how Ukraine is today using and testing American military equipment in battle, matter a whole lot. And that's one of Xi Jingping's primary concerns with his military. They have done 0 of this. They've never really been shot at. They haven't tested their equipment in any sort of real battle. For the software-minded, it's like they've always been in development and haven't even touched a preview environment, let alone production. And worrying enough the US has demonstrated the capability to bypass and/or destroy Chinese and Russian military equipment including air defense and radar arrays - this is worrisome for those countries. If it comes time for a real war, well the only evidence you have so far is your state of the art equipment or close enough to it was absolutely fucking useless when it came to operations involving the US. Whooops. They may start a war and find out they made a lot of bad assumptions and didn't train well enough and then what? I'd encourage you to think about this a little more than you are here.

cumshitpiss 3mo ago

[dead]

input_sh 3mo ago

This isn't WW1, not a lot of experience is necessary to point a missile or a drone towards the target.

groomlake 3mo ago
You could also reduce WW1 to “pointing your rifle towards the target.”
_heimdall 3mo ago
You may overestimate the skill demanded of soldiers in trench warfare. The mental and physical ability to stay in the fight is unimaginable. The skill expected with regards to attacking the enemy, well the goal was mostly to just not stick your head above the trench wall.

nemothekid 3mo ago

I'm not sure that any of that actually matters. Wars are not Call of Duty. It's politically difficult to invest actual manpower in Iran and Unless China were to nuke Hawaii, an all out war with China would also immediately be politically unpopular. China, like Iran, wouldn't doesn't need to defeat the US, they just need to hold out long enough for the US economy to collapse, which would happen way faster if China is the opposition. The only reason we don't have $6 gas right now is because of a ton of financially engineering. I don't know how anyone could convince the American public that $10 gas and war time rations is worth defending Taiwan.

tintor 3mo ago
> The only reason we don't have $6 gas right now ... I see you are not in California.
- FuriouslyAdrift 3mo ago
  California has both very high taxes on gas and a custom formulation that is only used in California... which is just about the most Californian thing I can think of.
  - hollerith 3mo ago
    The atmosphere of coastal California (i.e., where most Californians live) has about one tenth the capacity to dilute pollutants as the atmosphere of most of the rest of the US (because inversions are common especially in the summer). Air quality in coastal Southern California was awful back when California used the same gas the rest of the country did.
_heimdall 3mo ago
I'm curious what the financial engineering you're referring to was. I've been trying to understand why gas is still comparatively cheap given the war and the best I've landed on so far is that the spread between feedstock (crude oil) and output (diesel, gas, jet fuel, etc) widened in large part die to flooding the market with strategic oil reserves. We keep crude prices low, which is what many indicators track, while we couldn't keep final product prices low as easily because we can't quickly increase refinery capacity. How did they financially suppress fuel prices?

freehorse 3mo ago

> China, in it's modern incarnation, and every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle. I wish people would take a short stop here and contemplate a bit on this sentence.

bitmasher9 3mo ago
All of this talk about entering a hot war with China is crazy because of this fact. You don’t go directly from literally zero battles to starting a war with one of the strongest armies.
- owebmaster 3mo ago
  How long it takes for an army to have zero experience to be heavily experienced? 1 year? 3 years? 5 years? Can their enemies win before that?
  - bitmasher9 3mo ago
    Probably 5+ years. Institutions learn slowly, especially top down institutions like militaries and governments. The Ukraine war is 4+ years old, and they are still making significant improvements on their tactics. This is with support and advice from experienced militaries like US and France.
glaslong 3mo ago
Goals tbh
- scarecrowbob 3mo ago
  Seriously.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
linkregister 3mo ago
The PLA has engaged in many battles over the last few decades. There were some as recent as 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army#Engagements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army#Eng...

close04 3mo ago

> China, in it's modern incarnation, and every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle. Nothing. No one has any rank that has bearing on any kind of combat. Just decades of self-congratulatory war games. Ukraine wasn't really wearing the war crown either and they managed to redefine the face of war to the point where countries with trillion dollar militaries are taking notes. Your jab isn't totally unwarranted, China like most countries has no battle tested military. But your correct premise suggests a conclusion which just isn't there. If I say "China hasn't lost a war in decades, while the US is successfully losing to an enemy that's been strangled from all sides for decades" the premise is true but the conclusion is still up for being written.

rootsudo 3mo ago

Vs, the unities which has lost its engagement since.. the Vietnam or Korean war? Don’t get me wrong, I’m pro-American all the way. I just am not sure which is better: to defer and not be in war or to be in war and lose due to economics vs brute firepower/manpower/superiority.

rightbyte 3mo ago

In "actual fighting" the losses are such that the units are weakened not like leveling up experience. I don't think soldiers survive any meaningful amount of combat to get experience in combat. Pooping without WC is what they get good at which you can do in exerciss too. Logistics and support staff might get experience maybe ...

kfse 3mo ago

Didn't at least some living generals fight in Vietnam?

importantbrian 3mo ago
For the US? No. The mandatory retirement age is 64. The fall of Saigon was 1975. So the youngest you could be to have served in Vietnam is 69. The last general with Vietnam experience retired in 2010.
- kfse 3mo ago
  No for China. Apparently Zhang Youxia was one with combat experience in Vietnam but got purged recently.

SmirkingRevenge 3mo ago

I think this comes out in the wash mostly. While we're going to have lots of officers who've been to war for a while yet, turnover eventually evens the playing field. The people who would be doing the actual fighting in a war today have never been to war. And as we've seen in Ukraine, warfare is always evolving, making some subset of past war experience less valuable.

WarmWash 3mo ago
The upper ranks of the US military is absolutely littered with guys who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its the difference between having a CEO who was a competent engineer for years before becoming the CEO, and having a CEO who went to business school and played software dev tycoon for 10 years before walking in the door to be CEO on the first day of their first real job.

nixon_why69 3mo ago

This is a big deal for infantry forces but I suspect rather less for air and missile forces. If anything, US pilots might be unequipped psychologically to deal with anything newer than 50yo MiGs.

hollerith 3mo ago

Good point, but China's generals were trained by generals with experience in a proper war, which is not nothing. Specifically, Beijing sent 3 million Chinese soldiers to assist Pyongyang in evicting the US Army and its allies from North Korea. An invasion of Taiwan would entail a large naval component, though, and China really has zero experience in naval warfare even if you accept my assertion that there would be some value in having admirals trained by admirals trained by admirals with experience in a proper war.

gbuk2013 3mo ago

> every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle How I wish for a world where the same could be said for every other army!