The Next Major War...

CurtSibling

ENEMY ACE™
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In our fast-moving world of international tension, especially between the three big kids in the global schoolyard,
it is not hard to imagine a major war in the not too distant future. If you had to make an educated (or non-educated)
guess - Where, for what reasons, and how is the next large-scale war breaking out?

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Please feel free to detail below your projected reasons, causes, and players in the next major war.
 
It's not going to be a usual suspect.

Water will be an aggravating factor.
There's the classic India/Pakistan.

Won't be Israel anytime soon.
 
In our fast-moving world of international tension, especially between the three big kids in the global schoolyard,
it is not hard to imagine a major war in the not too distant future. If you had to make an educated (or non-educated)
guess - Where, for what reasons, and how is the next large-scale war breaking out?

View attachment 538325

Please feel free to detail below your projected reasons, causes, and players in the next major war.

What about the possibility of a big bully from the extra-terrestrial high school coming to pick on the kids in the aforementioned Earth schoolyard. It's possible - not necessarily plausible - but possible. And, if they actually have the technology to get here, and find a habitable planet in the void of space, I don't think overlooked atmospheric germs, abundant hydrospheres, or hacking their ships with an Apple laptop would likely be in the cards as a realistic solution.
 
Just taking place to read your thoughts.

I am absolutelly awful predicting things, touch screens had no future, internet in mobiles had no sense, a guy I saw in a youth match was going to be the new Messi and this was going to be the casus belli of WWIII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Russian_Sukhoi_Su-24_shootdown
 
Just taking place to read your thoughts.

I am absolutelly awful predicting things, touch screens had no future, internet in mobiles had no sense, a guy I saw in a youth match was going to be the new Messi and this was going to be the casus belli of WWIII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Russian_Sukhoi_Su-24_shootdown

Planes being shot down don't really start wars.

Eg Greece/Turkey, that flight over the Ukraine, Pakistan/India.

In the 80s the USSR shot down a passenger jet, the USA shot down an Iranian one, and a East German pilot bailed out and his jet flew into West Germany and crashed into a residential area killing a kid.

Oh Israel also shot up an American ship.

Incidents like this happen all the time.
 
What about the possibility of a big bully from the extra-terrestrial high school coming to pick on the kids in the aforementioned Earth schoolyard. It's possible - not necessarily plausible - but possible. And, if they actually have the technology to get here, and find a habitable planet in the void of space, I don't think overlooked atmospheric germs, abundant hydrospheres, or hacking their ships with an Apple laptop would likely be in the cards as a realistic solution.

I think Battle Los Angeles presented the most realistic alien invasion scenario. Conquering and occupying an entire planet is a pretty daunting task, even for an extremely advanced civilization. So the scenario in Battle LA of aliens attacking not to conquer, but just to raid us for our water seems much more likely than an Independence Day type scenario.
 
Planes being shot down don't really start wars.

Eg Greece/Turkey, that flight over the Ukraine, Pakistan/India.

In the 80s the USSR shot down a passenger jet, the USA shot down an Iranian one, and a East German pilot bailed out and his jet flew into West Germany and crashed into a residential area killing a kid.

Oh Israel also shot up an American ship.

Incidents like this happen all the time.


It was not just the shot down.
It was the whole background. Turkey and Russia were involved in Syrian civil war, there was enough tension to use a single issue as pretext to start something bigger.
 
It was not just the shot down.
It was the whole background. Turkey and Russia were involved in Syrian civil war, there was enough tension to use a single issue as pretext to start something bigger.

Lol I rem remember the cold war. Tail end but still.

Russia's economy is the size of Italy and a NATO member.

Putin will sabre rattle and talk a big game for domestic audience he won't go to war over it.

Turkey just wants to best be Kurds.
 
I think Battle Los Angeles presented the most realistic alien invasion scenario. Conquering and occupying an entire planet is a pretty daunting task, even for an extremely advanced civilization. So the scenario in Battle LA of aliens attacking not to conquer, but just to raid us for our water seems much more likely than an Independence Day type scenario.

You clearly have not read Dark forest or the three body trilogy series ?
Any Alien invasion will be like colonialism, humans will have crappy bows while the Aliens have destroyers and machine guns. it wont be long before countries ally themselves with aliens and act as native troops. Any star faring Alien race will be so advanced that that thre tech will look like magic to us dumb apes.
 
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I think Battle Los Angeles presented the most realistic alien invasion scenario. Conquering and occupying an entire planet is a pretty daunting task, even for an extremely advanced civilization. So the scenario in Battle LA of aliens attacking not to conquer, but just to raid us for our water seems much more likely than an Independence Day type scenario.

If an alien race (AI or biological) is advanced enough to travel space....They could wipe Earth out with a relativistic weapon in nanoseconds.
 
I suspect the next major war will have climate change at its root. I expect there to be major disruptions as much the tropics become uninhabitable, and as we seem to have such problems dealing with the trickle of refugees from this area now, I have little hope we will be able to handle such a mass migration without conflict. I am not really sure of the where, but south asia has lots of potential, as does north africa / middle east / south europe.
 
I don't expect another major war (ever), at most you'll see little things like isolated military engagements (like Syria), but nothing that's going to cause like worldwide panic or destruction or conscription, etc.

Do any of you know if it's still true that no two countries with McDonalds have been at war?
 
I don't expect another major war (ever), at most you'll see little things like isolated military engagements (like Syria), but nothing that's going to cause like worldwide panic or destruction or conscription, etc.

Do any of you know if it's still true that no two countries with McDonalds have been at war?
Nope, from wiki:
  • The 1989 United States invasion of Panama
  • In 1999, India and Pakistan fought a war over Kashmir, known as the Kargil War. Both countries had (and continue to have) McDonald's restaurants. Although the war was not fought in all possible theatres (such as the Rajasthan and Punjab borders), both countries mobilised their military all along their common borders and both countries made threats involving their nuclear capabilities.
  • The 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, following hostilities ongoing since 1973, with South Lebanon occupied until May 2000. (McDonald's franchises were established in Israel and Lebanon in 1993 and 1998, respectively.) However, the Lebanese Armed Forceswere not a party to the fighting, the Israel Defense Forces action being taken instead against the paramilitary group Hezbollah.
  • The 2008 South Ossetia war between Russia and Georgia. Both countries had McDonald's at the time (restaurants began in the two countries in 1990 and 1999, respectively).[3]
  • The 2014 Crimean crisis between Russia and Ukraine. Both countries had McDonald's at the time.
And from Scopes:
a look to the Balkans disproves the McDonald’s theory. The first McDonald’s in what was then Yugoslavia opened up to much fanfare on 24 March 1988 in Belgrade, now the capital of Serbia.
A series of bloody conflicts in the 1990s resulted in the piecemeal dissolution of Yugoslavia and led to the Kosovo War, which was waged between February 1998 and June 1999 and pitted the forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (an entity comprising Montenegro and Serbia) against the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) rebel group, the latter supported by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in the air and the Albanian army on the ground.
It was the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, whose capital was Belgrade, that U.S.-led NATO forces bombed during the Kosovo War between 24 March 1999 and 10 June 1999. Several McDonald’s-containing countries, including the United States, participated in this campaign, which can accurately be described as pitting several McDonald’s countries against the McDonald’s-containing country known then as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia​
 
I don't expect another major war (ever), at most you'll see little things like isolated military engagements (like Syria), but nothing that's going to cause like worldwide panic or destruction or conscription, etc.
I guess it depends what you mean by major. A few years ago, Dexter Filkins wrote an article about Pakistan's military. He saw Pakistani generals who were in the "winnable nuclear war" phase of their thinking, like college undergrad reading Ayn Rand for the first time and thinking, "dude, this could totally work" between bong hits. Curtis LeMay-type guys that we mostly got rid of in the 1960s before they could do any real damage. Imagine a Curtis LeMay during a serious incident like the Cuban Missile Crisis, but with a more... shall we say... 'malleable' president or prime minister? Boom. Oh, did I mention that India is building hydro-electric dams upriver of Pakistan's fresh water supply, and the entire Earth is getting hotter? (iirc, the US Defense Department was the first agency to identify global warming as a serious threat to national security, and I think they wrote about it years ago. You know what the spark was that set off the Syrian civil war? A drought.)

p.s. I didn't even think to include the myriad accidents that could happen. A US Navy destroyer accidentally collided with a civilian ship, I think because the crew was sleepy or something. The ship was Japanese, so the diplomatic ruckus didn't result in shots fired, but what if it had been a North Korean fishing trawler that was secretly spying on South Korea? A conventional shooting war between the Koreas that gets sorted out in 12 hours would leave many, many dead on both sides. I don't know how many planes South Korea could put in the air in, say, an hour, but I bet it's a lot.

Do any of you know if it's still true that no two countries with McDonalds have been at war?
Russia and Ukraine?
 
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Lots of people truly believe now that the era of major, state-on-state warfare is over forever because one hasn't happened recently. I think that's absurd, and that we're just experiencing a lull in the fighting. Most reasons people give were also given before the War to End All Wars, and look how that turned out.

Possibilities:

1. Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and possibly or probably the US vs. Iran and Hezbollah. Quite a few people seem to be itching for this. Not sure how Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Qatar, and Bahrain would figure into this. Russia could also get involved.

2. India vs. Pakistan, over a combination of Kashmir, drought, and domestic political issues requiring looking "tough". As always for the past 25 years, this could go nuclear, and become the deadliest war up to that point. China could intervene on Pakistan's behalf in some way.

3. Russia, despite its its small GDP, is actually far stronger than NATO in Europe. Most European militaries are crumbling due to a refusal to pay for spare parts for their equipment, so the numbers of tanks, aircraft, and ships they have on paper is far greater than what actually functions anymore. If he fails to flip European governments to his side by helping install friendly and pliable parties, and if he feels cornered, Putin could quite easily seize the Baltic States within a few days, rush troops to heavily fortify it, and dare NATO to do something, safe in the knowledge that it would take months to assemble any credible force to retake them. It's also very doubtful many countries in the West would have publics willing to stomach tens of thousands of deaths, especially if Putin made it clear he considered the Baltic States territory of Russia to be defended with "nuclear de-escalation." People scoff at this now, but then, in 2013, people actually believed that the age of countries invading each other and annexing each others' territory was a thing of the past, and look how that turned out. Doing this would prove the inability and unwillingness of NATO to defend its members, making membership unattractive and potentially causing the collapse of the Organization. It would also give Putin a major popularity boost, help him reclaim some of the Soviet Union's level of power, territory, and prestige, and create a direct land bridge to Kaliningrad. And it would be quick and easy.

4. US-China relations continue to deteriorate, China strengthens, and Taiwan grows distant. This could lead to a PRC invasion of Taiwan someday. If the US intervened, it could get brutal, and US carrier groups are not invulnerable and cannot just bomb China like it's Iraq.
 
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Crazy Thought: Vox wins Spanish elections next sunday. Spain declares war on UK and tries to win Gibraltar back
 
I think Battle Los Angeles presented the most realistic alien invasion scenario. Conquering and occupying an entire planet is a pretty daunting task, even for an extremely advanced civilization. So the scenario in Battle LA of aliens attacking not to conquer, but just to raid us for our water seems much more likely than an Independence Day type scenario.

Water is plentiful/more available with much less energy to overcome gravity elsewhere, even in our solar system. There's not much in particular they might raid us for, unless they for some reason they value something about us specifically (hard to conceive, but so are the motivations of undiscovered IRL aliens).

Aliens are a vanishingly unlikely cause of a next major war on Earth though, at least compared to alternative sources. War might very well be straight up digital/economic, since that alone could completely cripple daily life/collapse modern countries.

4. US-China relations continue to deteriorate, China strengthens, and Taiwan grows distant. This could lead to a PRC invasion of Taiwan someday. If the US intervened, it could get brutal, and US carrier groups are not invulnerable and cannot just bomb China like it's Iraq.

If I had to pick one, I'd probably guess this. But China isn't likely to intentionally fight a declining but still presently much stronger US. Their global moves suggest an attempt at the long game, given their moves in Sri Lanka/Africa.

Another possibility is collapse of EU (say escalation between eastern vs western members/philosophies) and war over resources there, but that's probably decades out if it ever happens. This is a scenario that would boost (or be boosted by) the Russian move you mention.
 
Obviously the next war will be between Andorra and Bhutan.
 
Russia's GDP size is between UK and Germany. Military-wise it can seize Baltic States in few days because they pretty much have no army to speak of.
But it has no capability to fight a war against EU, and has nothing to gain from conflict with EU or NATO.
Which of course, doesn't mean there is no risk of major war.
 
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