Somewhat doubtful, given how there have been riots in Iran against the regime ever since Operation Ajax installed the shiite immamate. We did a lot of shady shit in the middle east because it was easy to argue to congress that the muslims were toffee flavored christians who were looking for protection from the militantly atheist commies in Russia.
They would quickly find that Diego Garcia and Guam can slap them across the face and that they are ill equipped to fight a strategic war against the U.S.
The targets of strategic war are infrastructure. China is a fish in a barrel as we dismantle their air defense grids and engage at our leisure… while they are fully incapable of doing the same.
They have first and second strike nuclear capability, but only an estimated 32 delivery systems with sufficient range to strike deeper than the coastal extremities. Even if we give them a 400% margin of error… 120 nukes get lost in the territorial mass of the U.S. Though figure a good 30-70% of those will be within the emgagement envelope of anti missile assets, depending on how many of those platforms are mobile.
It's a war we don't want to fight… but a war that is impossible for China to win if they try. Makes much more sense to respect Korea's sovereign status and just buy shit, rather than pillage it. Taiwan, on the other hand… that's about principle, and God only knows if China will ever let that go.
Sabotage. Airport security for maintenance and hangars is fairly lax, particularly at small district and regional airports.
The military has entire teams who pour over aircraft to inspect them between flights… and there is always some shit going on. Civilian craft a little less intense, but your main wear items get per flight turnaround inspections. … who does the inspections out at your municipal airport?
Not hard to have someone experienced in the theory to apply it creatively to crating component, system, and cascade failures.
Well… grew up in a diecasting family of business owners and managers…. or the back woods native american descendants from the other side of my family… so I'll break down the chemical composition of something unique to Dutchman's Britches… but look at a botanist like a deer in the headlights when he throws out classifications.
More directly to your question - grew up studying military hardware like most kids study cars and boobs. Enlisted, blew the ASVAAB out of existence, and told them what I wanted to do (they were hard up for ET nukes at the time… but I knew reactor duty would suck, and my passion was aviation). Avionics tech. Had technical training in electronics, computer programming/networking, and microcontrollers before that.
Enlisted as a reservist because my mother was going through cancer treatment at the time… she was diagnosed terminal and deceased before I returned. Fell into a slump after that, self-feeding depressionary cycle that pretty much destroyed my shot at special warfare development I was looking at. Father passed away a couple years later and I kind of had to finish facing the world at that point. Went msron before it became corivron and deployed to watch us ship equipment out of Iraq just before ISIS took over. That was when I went from "government is stupid and lazy" to "… no… no… they were fucking told this would happen."
Spent a lot of my time reading various books, intel reports, etc… I discussed infantry tactics as fluidly as I would discuss military history or the operating modes of a radar.
There isn't a lot on my official training records. My fault, really. But it's hard to say what my background really is… as I'll cover every spectrum with equal ease. I've worked some biomed positions, factory jobs, maintenance… grew up on the earlier days of the internet when "social media" was effectively chat rooms and boards simar to 4chan. So I got used to tackling problems and questions without fear as I went about trying to tell people twice my age that they were wrong on my internet…. then got my ass handed to me and shown I was ill-prepared for the argument.
But I am sliding all over the place.
I played a lot of simulators as a kid and extrapolated my experiences with scenario editors into real world data and intel estimates. Since I also know our capabilities fairly well just from looking at the kind of hardware we put into play… I ultimately "know" far more than I should… or, I think I do.
Information classification systems were designed before the internet and I could search university white papers for key terms as well as various news and industry articles within 10 minutes of each other. Classified information can be composed of unclassified information that, when assembled, creates a security risk - and therefor a classified document.
I'm tired and sliding around…
That is an absolute last ditch effort. The 'problem' for them is not Trump, it is the people who are trying to buck the establishment system.
To say it would be a declaration of open season on them is a bit of an understatement…