So prior to 2022, how did Russia meme the world into believing that they were the 2nd most powerful military in the world? It's not just sites like global firepower too, I have seen a number of analyst and military experts actually say that Russia had a more powerful military than China prior to Feb 2022. This are people who actually get paid to study this shit for a living. I seriously don't understand how this "experts" could have come to this conclusion if they had just done a few hours of research.

It's not just the overall tech advantage that China has, but the sheer economy, population and industrial advantage would surely have clinched China the N2 spot even if they were drastically behind Russia on tech. Personally, I would have put China as 2nd as early as 2010. This is why I don't trust the "experts" btw. Crazy how they could get something so basic wrong. I have no idea how Russia psyoped the world so badly. Even today, globalfirepower and an army of Indians still has Russia as the 2nd most powerful country and the same "experts" still somehow rank Russia as this massive military threat, even though they are probably behind Poland or Germany at this point.

It doesn't take much to be an expert, nor does being an expert confer any special insight. You know the reformers were all officers and professional analysts, meaning their retarded gay shit was said with some authority on the matter?

>>64023221 (OP)
Lying, my friend. Overblown specs, overblown numbers of 'totally functional' units, exacerbated munitions stockpiles, corruption swept under the rug, etc.
Makes you wonder what other eastern plutocratic/dictatorial face culture countries are doing the same right now, but unlike russia they haven't had their lies get torn through like so many tungsten balls through thin sheet metal.

>>64023226
To shamelessly add to my own post - the 'experts' also need a good enemy to point at as a threat. Russia has minimal trade with the US and only really traded with europe in the form of fuels. Compared to china which made a whole load of shit for very cheap that most western nations would buy, russia is simply a much easier shadow puppet to use as an enemy. But now russia is provably not what it was thought of, and a new threat (however real) exists. Both are shitholes antithetical to western societal norms with expansionist dreams, so conflict or at least a ton of friction is inevitable. Unless they break themselves first.

>>64023226
Even taking Russian wundeweapons at face value, the sheer scale difference between the two countries would have China as the more powerful purely due to numbers alone.

>>64023221 (OP)
that's not what you said last time
https://desuarchive.org/k/thread/63932531/#63932531

retards thought military parades represent power

>>64023240
Not so. Russia had a massive leg up on paper as they exited the cold war era in a more developed state (in terms of military production) and, more importantly, has the cold war stockpiles. Again, on paper.
The further we get from the cold war the less those stockpiles are worth of course, and with the recent sharp turn towards 'fuckall and bogus specs' they no longer hold any value, real or imagined.
Does china have better production capacity? Absolutely. Are their weapons better? Eeh, probably a little better than the cold war shit left over for russia.
Are their specs accurate? Only if you take my claim of having a 2 foot dick at face value.
Raw numbers of dudes only gets you so far, and the greater the technological distamce to your opponent the less that advantage manifests.
China is the new late USSR. Scary and competent at face value, but inherently not believable and remains to be proven.

Three main points:
1. Institutionalized culture of lying, which penetrates society and culture so deep that it would make asiatic face culture blush. People don't only lie for export (the so-called "special agent pidorashka mindset"), but they lie internally as well. Literally everything in the soviet union (and partially before it) was about making things look good, instead of getting actual results. Need I remind everyone that "potyomkin villages" became a meme back in czarist russia? They lie to others and themselves to such a degree that their own supporters exist in a bubble of bullshit.
2. The overwhelming majority of the "russia studies" and "russia experts" abroad were compromised by KGB/FSB faggots and russian propaganda during the last century. Prize-winning western journalists brown nosing stalin and whitewashing genocide (e.g. Walter Duranty) and talking heads like Chomsky are just the most obvious tip of the iceberg. Literally most of the experts were IRL not much better than Scott "the pedo" Retard and Cuckchair "nostradumbass" Copelord, it's just that in our year of 202X with internet and actual war happening you can actually see how full of shit they are. Before that the majority ate up russian shit and asked for seconds.
3. The overall russian propaganda was (and still is) aggressively projected outwards, with both corrupt connections, useful idiots and other shit, while the reality was hidden from those affected by propaganda by the culture, geography and language barriers. You have generations of people abroad raised with russian propaganda points surrounding them in media, who subconsciously reproduce the propaganda in their own shit. Even typical western media products (be it disney cartoons like Anastasia, video games like Call of Duty or even modern TV shows) can help themselves but reproduce russian propaganda, because those talking points are "the norm" for people, since they exposed to them for so long that they no longer detected.

>>64023221 (OP)
I guess it’s a mix about nukes and China being halfway through their modernization efforts

>>64023221 (OP)
by being able to fight a proxy war against all of Nato and still winning

>>64023221 (OP)
>It's not just sites like global firepower too, I have seen a number of analyst and military experts actually say that Russia had a more powerful military than China prior to Feb 2022.
They did. Not powerful enough to invade China obviously, but then China couldn't have invaded Russia, either. The joke isn't that Russia was second, it's that the gap between the US and Russia is shown being so small. The US could take on every other country on that list at the same time and have their militaries destroyed in two months.

>>64023311
>being halfway through their modernization efforts
As was russia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGafVj-wrmw

>an alliance between china and russia where the economic influence of the former is combined with the diplomatic and military weight of the latter would produce a pact that would rival the west for global supremacy the two complement each other's strengths Russia is an enormous land power with large volumes of natural resources notably hydrocarbons, it also has the world's largest nuclear weapons arsenal as well as a high-tech military industry

>that said the chinese military remains conventional by current metrics

>What's keeping moscow and beijing from signing a binding treaty the answer is in the striking disparities between the two. Although military peers at the moment russia's military spending has fallen well behind take the annual budget of 2017. As an example while china made the largest absolute increase in military spending globally, Russia went into the opposite direction and made the largest decrease military spending wise china dwarfs russia by more than 52 billion dollars at the same time chinese scientists are reverse engineering high-tech russian weaponry at an astonishing rate in some military domainsc hina has even surpassed their russian counter parts. It is clear that in time the russian military will subordinate to china

This was from 2021... Also, I remember reading something by Peter Zeihan article from 2022 where he constantly praised the Russian military while constantly shitting on the Chinese military

>>64023221 (OP)
because for both Russia then and China now, you should plan your own defence as if the enemy is competent

it's one of the greatest principles in war: never bet that your people are inherently better warriors than the other guy, who is totally incompetent, in order to counterbalance huge materiel disadvantages
just ask the Japs

>>64023329
>They did. Not powerful enough to invade China obviously, but then China couldn't have invaded Russia, either

Nah, China mogs Russia from 2010 from sheer numbers alone. By 2022, China had numerous tech advantages, on top of their industrial and economical advantage.

>The US could take on every other country on that list at the same time and have their militaries destroyed in two months.

Nah, America can't invade China anymore. Destroy their navy? Maybe. But they're not invading anytime soon, but without some major allied support from the countries surrounding China.

>>64023366
invasion and occupation is a mug's game

just raze the enemy navy and air force and fuck off
it takes countries decades nowadays to build up a good fleet

>>64023366
The US could conventionally bomb every square inch of the entire country and there's nothing China could do about it.

>>64023253
>Are their weapons better?
The best way I've found of phrasing the answer to this question is to say that China makes the best russian hardware in the world

>>64023408
China has the largest missile force in the world just for the purpose of warding off the American navy. Also America spent 7 years dropping millions of bombs into Vietnam and Laos, did that win you the war?

>>64023423
Do Vietnam and Laos today possess weapons that can threaten American hegemony?

>>64023221 (OP)
They never been to Russia. Simple as. I was visiting family near Moscow and close to their datcha there was a military base that host one of the strongest if not the strongest radar in Russia. They were proudly saying how it was designed to be able to track air force one above DC.
Well, the whole place was overgrown, there was no security perimeter, the housing for the military personnel looked like a favela. It was a military base vital to nuclear deterrence so it gave quite a clue about Russian military readiness. Everything has been rotting and rusting since the fall of USSR and Russian army is still too big compared to Russian states means.
If anything, with all the hardware they lost in Ukraine, they are factually downsized and may finally match their ambition with money.

>>64023439
And yet a 7 year bombing campaign didn't break them. Give it up. Much like how China can't invade America, China is the one country that America also can't actually invade. Maybe if you had India donate a billion meat shields to the effort...

>>64023453
>a 7 year bombing campaign didn't break them
Broke them enough that they aren't a threat
>invade
Once again: not a necessary win condition

>>64023453
pajeets can't fight for shit so no, it would be like italy in ww2 levels of effort but worse,

the fact that amerimutts need to rally up an entire coalition of nations to invade together the tiny nation of iraq really speaks volumes about whos the real paper tiger of today, the houthis are still harassing american ships to this day with absolutely nothing they can do about it,

>>64023472
>impotent rage

well then, it just occurred to me how similar amerimutts and ziggers act, hit be like a rock just now its almost the exact same way in some way I can't seem to describe....

>>64023472
China is massive, literally millions of factories spread across the entire country. Bombing won't do much damage, even if China just sat back and did nothing. There hasn't been a single war won off the back of a bombing campaign.

>>64023502
the united states has already used up a huge chunk of its munitions supplying israel recently,
even if they exhausted all of their bombs it still wouldn't be close I don't even know why this is even an argument,
its like the 3 gorges dam fetishists, not knowing that its basically a gravity dam hundreds of meters of thick metal, that only a nuke would be able to break.

>>64023221 (OP)
Imagine if you were lying about your capabilities for decades. Every single thing you say is an outright lie or a sekwed fact or at minimum a fact disingenuously presented out of context.
Every single thing is like that. From the material of your uniform jackets to number of nuclear missiles. Everything is some degree of lie.
And the best part? Even your own people responsible for important decisions don't know the true state of things.

>>64023518
that gravity dam is holding back several nukes worth of energy. all a modern bunker buster bomb would need to do is weaken the dam in the right spot and it will destroy itself in a spectacular fashion.
The right spot is anywhere on the water side of the load bearing wall.

They had the most ground vehicles, AA, and artillery in the world. They were also stockpiling weapons and ammunition since WW2. Turns about all the surplus on the market was their WW3 stock.

>>64023518
Nothing the US gives or does to Israel will be more than a rounding error of anything. Ever.

>>64023545
We're giving them free B-2 bombers. Only 21 were made and no other country has. We give them free patriot missiles, which are expensive and in low quantity.

>>64023551
Patriots are not 'in low quantity', that's just an excuse by the administration to delay giving Ukraine any. Israel doesn't even use Patriot anymore, they phased it out in favor of THAAD and their indigenous systems last year.
The Bunker Buster Act is nascent and rather fringe, it won't pass review, let alone get voted into law.

You aren't an American.

>>64023518
>thinks you need to nuke a dam to ruin its structural integrity
Nope. That's why a single flaw can completely destroy a dam and a modern bunker buster can easily cause such a flaw, let alone a half dozen in a couple of locations.
You could do the same to the Hoover Dam if you wanted too. Look at what Britain did in WW2 for an example of how easy it is. Hydrostatic explosions will absolutely ruin any kind of structure.

>>64023482
>impotent rage
projecting

>>64023502
>China is massive, literally millions of factories spread across the entire country
I'd like to see them rebuild a military faster than it can be destroyed
>There hasn't been a single war won off the back of a bombing campaign
There hasn't been a bombing campaign with PGMs like we have now

>>64023253
>Raw numbers of dudes only gets you so far
It gets you VERY far

>>64023472
>Broke them enough that they aren't a threat
Illogical statement, they never were

>>64023502
>There hasn't been a single war won off the back of a bombing campaign
Worked against Serbia

>>64023540
What is the bizarre fascination with that dam
The dam gets blown up so what, nukes get thrown and the world goes to shit

>>64023655
>What is the bizarre fascination with that dam
it was once a meme and is now a bad-faith strawman

>>64023221 (OP)
same way they to this day get useful idiots to simp for them. the power of propaganda. never underestimate its subversive effects, especially in the age of social media that allows propaganda ministries to directly shit into the heads of every layman on the street

>>64023221 (OP)
>prior to 2022, how did Russia meme the world into believing that they were the 2nd most powerful military in the world

Did you think "news" outlets like RT just organically cropped up in every country after 2008 or so and started "independently" "informing" people about Russian wunderwaffen?

>>64023253
I think its 100% believable that China produces the Russian equipment with access to near-Western peer electronics and processors. That means that they likely DO have tanks on par with the T-90MS' paper specs and as such should be factored in to their capabilities.
Does it mean they match Western vehicles and such? No but it means they at least perform on par with what Russia claimed their vehicles and platforms can do.
The recent scuffle with Pakistan vs India showed their BVR missiles DO work well enough to score kills on Indian airframes, specifically a Rafale, but since we don't know if the pilot was competent or not, its better to just assume he was and the missile worked as intended rather than Captain Ramjeet Monkeyraper completely forgetting his core defensive training and not using chaff/flares and so on.
I still think China is full of hot air in some capacity but recent performance of their equipment has been fairly adequate for their importing operators so they clearly aren't just flying into the ground in peacetime like the Russian airframes are.

>>64023654
And still serbs didn't give up until the boots on the ground were announced.

>>64023476
Coalition building was a political imperative, not military.

>>64023221 (OP)
Because of Cold War stockpiles. The assumption was that these weapons had been cared for just like US aircraft boneyards. They, in fact, were not.