MAP PR0N!

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, chasfh said:

There's a correlation between this and which countries I most want to visit.

No surprise the Finns understand their situation all too well, but Erdogan apparently doing quite the job of keeping the Turks riled up.

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, romad1 said:

Australia has a very large US military presence on the north coast.  It would be an immediate target of PRC attack in a WWIII scenario.  As does Guam (presuming that is the blue dot in the western Pacific). 

True. My father and Uncle both served in the PTO so I'd heard all the names of the places, but until my trip to Australia I never had any sense of how close WWII came to 'down under'. I'd always known separately about both the Battle of the Coral Sea, and that the Great Barrier Reef was the best place in the world to dive, but never understood they were basically the same place!

Edited 5 hours ago by gehringer_2

[romad1]

40 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

True. My father and Uncle both served in the PTO so I'd heard all the names of the places, but until my trip to Australia I never had any sense of how close WWII came to 'down under'. I'd always known separately about both the Battle of the Coral Sea, and that the Great Barrier Reef was the best place in the world to dive, but never understood they were basically the same place!

The distances here are not small though.  The US Marine base in Australia is in Darwin area in the Northern Territories (the area anyway) and the rest of civilized Australia is down south and east along the coast.  So, basically the back of beyond.   The base is a staging area for a bunch of systems that would further forward deploy to the islands in the western Pacific in the event of a ...thing with the PRC.   There are a couple of these already deployed to the Philippines and may be deployed to Japan which are causing the PRC leadership to lose their minds.  This would be the Typhon (not typhoon) missile system.  Muy bueno for us system.  

 

edit: looks like kegsbreath and the Japanese decided to deploy to Japan. 

https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2025/09/15/us-army-reveals-typhon-missile-system-in-japan/

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, romad1 said:

The US Marine base in Australia is in Darwin area in the Northern Territories (the area anyway)

On a flight from Sydney to Darwin we stopped at tiny airport at GOVE (8,000 ft runway though), which looked like it was only there for the military. Unclear what the stop was for. Maybe something in the cargo hold (triple 7 IIRC).....

The attention span of the US media is so short it hard to know if Xi has let the temperature come down a little over Taiwan  (as might be the recent perception) or if it's just fallen off our American media radar.

Edited 3 hours ago by gehringer_2

[romad1]

6 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

On a flight from Sydney to Darwin we stopped at tiny airport at GOVE (8,000 ft runway though), which looked like it was only there for the military. Unclear what the stop was for. Maybe something in the cargo hold (triple 7 IIRC).....

The attention span of the US media is so short it hard to know if Xi has let the temperature come down a little over Taiwan  (as might be the recent perception) or if it's just fallen off our American media radar.

If you ask the Falun Gong/Shen Yun types in America you'll hear that Xi is no longer alive or is no longer in control. 

If you look at Drudge you'll see a lot of alarmist stuff.  

Its shrugs from me.  My preference is they are kept off the warpath because they fear we smack them hard enough to cause regime collapse.  That's what they fear.