Potential Flashpoint for Internatinal Conflict

Well the Geneva convention better not apply if we end up at war with China…

They could just simply “surrender” and we wouldn’t have enough housing to keep them, the ability to feed them, or the ability to guard them.

At all.

And the only hope the western powers would actually have of winning, would involve biological warfare.

@Gargantua:

Well the Geneva convention better not apply if we end up at war with China… They could just simply “surrender” and we wouldn’t have enough housing to keep them, the ability to feed them, or the ability to guard them.

Not a problem.  Let’s assume for fun that the U.S. and China are at war over the possession of a given territory – let’s say the port city of Shanghai – and let’s assume that the city is defended by a million Chinese troops.  Now let’s say that a U.S. airborne division parachutes into the city, and that all the Chinese troops in the city respond by immediately surrendering (for whatever inexplicable reason they might have) to the 10,000 or so American soldiers.  Yes, that would make them POWs, which means the American troops would be obliged to detain and care for them as such (after disarming them, of course).  The fastest way to solve the problem would be for the White House to state that the U.S. had achieved its objective (annexing Shanghai) and to unilaterally declare that the war was over.  At this point the Chinese POWs cease to be POWs and all the Americans have to do is to repatriate them to China, which would simply involve pointing to the road that leads out of the city and telling them to start walking until they cross the brand-new border between the United States Federal Territory of Shanghai and the People’s Republic of China.  All of this could be done in just a few hours, which means that the U.S. airborne guys wouldn’t even need to share a single MRE ration pack with the Chinese troops.

And if the roles got reversed, you all know the Chinese army will not be sharing any MSG ration packs either.

US troops sharing MRE’s may be considered an act of biological warfare. Those things do insidious things to the digestive system!

I wonder what would happen if they deliberately surrendered something like 2 million troops (who knew the game), and then kept another million or two engaged in the conflict,

I guess the west starts learning better ways of keeping millions of soldiers underguard?   I wonder what the ratio of guards to prisoners would be…

US troops sharing MRE’s may be considered an act of biological warfare.

Just imagine what would happen to the chinese soldiers, if they were subjected to translated American reality T.V.

@Gargantua:

US troops sharing MRE’s may be considered an act of biological warfare.

Just imagine what would happen to the chinese soldiers, if they were subjected to translated American reality T.V.

And if we subjected them to eating T.V. Dinners rather tham MREs while they were watching those shows.

There’s a certain amount of truth to that MrMalachiCrunch……, something so crazy it might work.

@MrMalachiCrunch:

Feed them what we feed our own kids, in a short period of time they would be too fat to fight!

And in fact this would be somewhat in line with what the Geneva Conventions prescribe, since they require that POWs be given rations which do not fall below the allocation of food given to the troops who are detaining them.  The Americans could even argue to visiting Red Cross inspectors, “Hey, we’re not only respecting the Geneva Conventions, we’re going above and beyond them.  We’re not feeding the POWs the notoriously bad military rations that our own troops always complain about, we’re feeding them the much more tasty and nutrious food we give to our own beloved kids back home!”

@Gargantua:

Well the Geneva convention better not apply if we end up at war with China…

They could just simply “surrender” and we wouldn’t have enough housing to keep them, the ability to feed them, or the ability to guard them.

At all.

And the only hope the western powers would actually have of winning, would involve biological warfare.

I’d rather we lost then it came to that.

I’d rather we lost then it came to that.

I wouldn’t.

Their neighborhood now has more millionares than ours.

https://news.fidelity.com/news/news.jhtml?cat=CompanyNews&articleid=201206191519STREETCMREALTIME_11586397&IMG=N

Other countries may take China to WTO court over its dominance and manipulation of the rare earth metals market.

https://news.fidelity.com/news/news.jhtml?cat=CompanyNews&articleid=201206200538RTRSNEWSCOMBINED_BRE85J0DV_1&IMG=Y

Indonesia has tripled the price of coal exported to China, to take advantage of their economic rise.
They may curtail exports more severely and utilize that coal for their own development.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-19/cheap-coal-is-dead-long-live-renewables-part-1-.html

The rising $/KWH electrical rate is slowing down growth in China and India.

Remember how energy resource aquisitions drove a lot of German and Japanese military planners in WWII?

No nation can sustain armed offensives when they lack energy/fuel.

@MrMalachiCrunch:

Told by their mouthpiece newspaper but again, no paper in China prints what those in power wish to be printed

Back when the USSR existed, there was a joke about an American tourist in Moscow asking a resident what the difference was between the newspapers Pravda (“Truth”) and Izvestia (“Information”).  The resident answered, “It’s very simple.  In Pravda, you will find much information but little truth.  In Izvestia you will find much truth but little information.”