I thread for general military, strategic, and related political topics that don't fit into the current more narrowly focused topics.
I did not know this (the bolded part):
QuoteRussian aggression laid bare how ill-prepared the West was for the brute use of force. We must go back and look into our arsenal. There's a gaping hole in conventional weapons, especially in conventional strike capabilities.
This is partly the result of the so-called INF Treaty (formally the Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Elimination of Their Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles), according to which the US refrained from possessing any missile launchers in the range of 500km to 5,500km.
The Chinese have extensively exploited this gap, and the Russians and the North Koreans are zealously filling in. I have pointed out elsewhere what this means for Japan and Asia. But with the onset of the Ukraine War, we must combine and co-ordinate Western efforts better, because the European front is in need of an urgent brush-up, which must not come at the cost of the Asian front. There's an urgent need to strengthen both missile-defense capabilities and intermediate-range missiles.
This is from a Japanese perspective, shared here (https://www.globalasia.org/v17no2/cover/time-to-think-big-japans-surprising-response-to-the-war-in-ukraine_yoko-iwama).