The Buoyancy of Psychopaths & the Genesis of the Great Asian War
Greg Guenthner

On the eve of the Great Asian War against China, in a rousing speech Biden assured the American people that the war was necessary because China was the most dangerous country in Latin America and didn’t have American values. The Wall Street Journalpointed out that the United States had the most advanced, lethal, best-trained, hypergalactic, and indomitable military the world had ever seen, and the fact that it could not defeat annoyed goatherders with rifles had no bearing on the matter since the Chinese didn’t have goats.

Washington was astonished when the Russian fleet showed up in support of China. It hadn’t thought of this. Nor had it occurred to anyone in the Federal Bubble that if America fired on a Russian ship, America would be in a war with Russia. Not a proxy war. Not a regional war. Not a limited war. A war. Everywhere.

This didn’t worry anyone, because Washington knew that America had the best-trained, best-armed, most advanced, and most hypergalactic military in the universe. All recent military history supported this understanding, unless you had read it, which nobody had. Further, the New York Times demonstrated that the Russians, then occupying Kiev, were badly trained, poorly equipped, suffered from poor morale, and wanted to overthrow their government as well as divide Russia into five countries under Washington’s control. The Times was famously independent of government, so no further investigation was thought necessary.

Washington had also forgotten Iran. Unfortunately for those in the Potomac Bubbylon, the Iranians — no fools — knew that Washington lacked the manpower, training, munitions, public support,  and industrial base to fight two major wars at once, and probably even one. The mullahs of course had huge stockpiles of missiles and an army not rotted by LGBT, affirmative action, lack of readiness, and impossibly inadequate logistics. So when the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Syria, Iraq, and all the militias that wanted the US out of the Middle East attacked  American bases in the region, Washington was sore amazed.

Congress, as it turned out, had forgotten that Russia had a large, combat-hardened, experienced, well-trained, and well-supplied army in — who would have thought it — Europe, along with a functioning military-industrial base as well as massive artillery and air support. This Russia was also aware of the inadequacies of the hypergalactic, indomitable social-engineering aquarium that the American military had become.  Russia also had actual combat experience with hypersonics, which America didn’t have — either the missiles or the experience, — and Europe didn’t have tanks or ammunition because it had sent them all to Ukraine, where the Russians had blown them up.

Another revelation  was that China wasn’t a backward sort of enlarged Guatemala where people manufactured pencils and maybe washing machines under European supervision. Nobody had thought of this. Part of the reason was that the House Committee on China had no member who read, wrote, or spoke Chinese — but this was not thought important, or thought of, because America was a democracy and thinking had nothing to do with it. It seemed China had a great many engineers of high quality who had spent decades readying China specifically to defeat America in its home waters. Simple arithmetic — apparently beyond Congress, none of whose members could calculate a binomial square — suggested that China could build, say, a thousand advanced satellite-guided, maneuvering, hypersonic anti-ship missiles, while Washington had at most ten aircraft carriers. A hundred swarm-launched  missiles per carrier weren’t important, though. Why not wasn’t clear.

The Navy responded, saying that it was hypergalactic and would defend itself with high-powered lasers that it didn’t have but might get sometime in a few decades, but Lockheed-Martin needed more money to fund this existential etc.

A few in Washington were unsettled when North Korea, seeing a chance to unify the peninsula while Washington was occupied with several major wars, none of which it could win, launched a massive attack southward. Washington didn’t care if a couple of millions of Koreans died, but the South was home to advanced semiconductor fabs, Samsung, and SK Hynix. To thwart this threat, Washington had to send troops it didn’t have, and who in any event weren’t combat-ready, by means of logistics that didn’t exist. And of course the North could nuke Seoul and the 28,000 American troops if what’s-his-lunacy had a brain spasm, and could probably nuke Japan.

By this time Washington had begun bombing the Chinese mainland in the assumption that the usual rules held: America could bomb anybody but nobody could bomb America, which just wouldn’t  be fair and all. When a half-dozen sub-launched, satellite-guided cruse missiles — the kind Russia and China have — hit the Pentagon and killed 80% of those within, the assumption of invincibility underwent revision. A committee was appointed. Other missiles hitting the New World Trade Center and coastal cities in California seemed worrisome, as both states voted Democrat.  It was noted that the Capitol and White House were a short bicycle ride from the Pentagon.

When American forces operating out of Japan began attacking China, this put the Japanese at war with Beijing. Chinese and perhaps Russian submarines began  burning tankers moving oil from the Gulf to Japan, which didn’t have any. At all. Washington didn’t worry about this because it knew that China would collapse in a few weeks, like the Russians in Ukraine,  because of American technology and hypergalactic training and the hissy-fits of its gender-fluid forces. When this didn’t happen, Japan used up its strategic reserves and came to a complete stop.

At first it was thought that the Navy could send destroyers to convoy tankers to Japan. Then, it discovered that it didn’t have any to spare because China had a bigger navy and Washington needed all it could find around Taiwan. Fortunately, this turned out not to be necessary, because the Yemenis and Iranians had destroyed the oil facilities around the Gulf, making protecting tankers unnecessary.

When China failed to collapse, Washington didn’t know what to do, because it hadn’t thought of this and didn’t have a Plan B or exit strategy and because it was ruled by, if not always doddering dotards, at least those who thought the year was still 1955 and that an aircraft carrier could frighten everybody.

Washington decided to block the Strait of Malacca because China would have to surrender. In desperation the Chinese, for whom the war was a matter of national survival, nuked a carrier — or maybe three, I don’t remember. All the hobby hawks and dingalings, as many called them, were greatly amazed because they had been told since birth that the use of nuclear weapons would mean catastrophic atomic war and the end of civilization, thought to be a bad thing.

This didn’t make sense, but we are talking about foreign policy. The President was still in the White House. Obviously, those who knew the city reasoned that if the rats weren’t leaving the ship, it wasn’t sinking. If Washington launched nuclear missiles against China, Chinese nuclear missiles would arrive 45 minutes later and all the hawks in Washington would become clots of feathers in bubbling pools of fat. This appealed to the populace, but not those in power.

Further, did it make sense to commit national suicide over one silly aircraft carrier? The arms industry could build another one.  The upshot was that both countries were willing to use nuclear weapons against the other’s forces but not against their homelands. It turned out that  Washington had more extra-homelandical, or maybe homelandish, forces than did China.

The rest is well known. There is no reason to recount the deaths of hundreds of millions because of the collapse of world manufacturing and shipping. No one had thought of that.

According to Fred, who is an occasionally reliable source (though he says his heart isn’t in it): I was born in 1945 in Crumpler, West Virginia, an unincorporated coal camp near Bluefield where my maternal grandfather was the camp doctor, and steam locomotives chuffed spectacularly in to load coal at the tipple. (When someone got sick on the other side of the mountain, the miners would put Big Pat, as granddad was called, in a coal car and take him under the mountain. He had a robust conception of a house call.) My father was a mathematician, but then serving in the Pacific aboard the destroyer USS Franks. My paternal grandfather was dean and professor of mathematics at Hampden-Sydney College, a small and (then, and perhaps now) quite good liberal arts school in southwest Virginia. In general my family for many generations were among the most literate, the most productive, and the dullest people in the South. Presbyterians.

After the war I lived as a navy brat here and there—San Diego, Mississippi, the Virginia suburbs of Washington, Alabama, what have you, and briefly in Farmville, Virginia, while my father went on active duty for the Korean War as an artillery spotter. I was an absorptive and voracious reader, a terrible student, and had by age eleven an eye for elevation and windage with a BB gun that would have awed a missile engineer. I was also was a bit of a mad scientist. For example, I think I was ten when I discovered the formula for thermite in the Britannica at Athens College in Athens, Alabama, stole the ingredients from the college chemistry laboratory, and ignited a mound of perfectly adequate thermite in the prize frying pan of the mother of my friend Perry, whose father was the college president. The resulting six-inch hole in the frying pan was hard to explain.

I went to high school in King George County, Virginia, while living aboard Dahlgren Naval Weapons Laboratory (my father was always a weapons-development sort of mathematician, although civilian by this time), where I was the kid other kids weren’t supposed to play with. I spent my time canoeing, shooting, drinking unwise but memorable amounts of beer with the local country boys, attempting to be a French rake with only indifferent success, and driving in a manner that, if you are a country boy, I don’t have to describe, and if you aren’t, you wouldn’t believe anyway. I remember trying to explain to my father why his station wagon was upside down at three in the morning after I had flipped it at seventy on a hairpin turn that would have intimidated an Alpine goat.

As usual I was a woeful student—if my friend Butch and I hadn’t found the mimeograph stencil for the senior Government exam in the school’s Dempster Dumpster, I wouldn’t have graduated—but was a National Merit Finalist.

 

 

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