While most radars can detect a stealth fighter, few systems are able to hold a lock on them. E.g. no system that Russia or China currently possess.

Aircraft carriers at sea are harder to sink than you think, and the ocean is big enough that you probably couldn't find them either.

But if you don’t have those fancy planes, guns, tanks, etc. but your enemy has, that first week will (somewhat) be of the “when the wars are fought against poorly equipped insurgents & rebel forces.” type for your enemy.

After a week, they will still have many of their fancy planes, and, likely, will have destroyed a lot of your infrastructure, killed your pilots, etc.

I think you need both fancy planes and the ability to rapidly ramp up production of less advanced weaponry.

Finally someone who understands this! All modern weapons are no doubt very effective, but they are also very complex ,take long time to build, need specialized factories and skilled workers and the result is that there aren't that many stockpiled. Because that's not only expensive, weapons also deteriorate and might malfunction if stored for extended period of time. Most of the fancy toys would run out after 1st month of actual war (assuming non-nuclear conflict, of course).

I don't expect a rerun of WW2. It's hard to tell exactly how things would turn out, but the concept of having factories beyond the reach of enemy bombers is obsolete with today's aircraft. It's more likely that whoever wins the first few battles will have an immense advantage over the other, which will be reduced to guerrilla tactics.

This is all assuming it's a total war without nukes though, which is fanciful.

A conventional war between nuclear powers over a third country (Taiwan?) could maybe possibly happen by attrition, but more probably by attrition of war morale, rather than war materiel.

> If we held a war, all of these fancy planes would be gone in the first week. So would all the aircraft carriers, a good number of ships, and likely all of the stealth bombers too.

Saying this does not make it true. Warfare is far more complex than you're making it out to be. Care to back up this statement with an explanation?

Yeah all those evil dictators who constantly want to attack super-powerful much bigger countries. Just incredible how often that happens.

I mean super-powers with nuclear weapons just constantly have to fight of these dictators.

What an odd as argument. This has literally never happened.

It reminds me of a funny little anecdote. In 1989, the USA instituted an arms embargo on China after Tiananmen (which was itself performed with tanks outfitted with American-made guns). However, President Bush allowed a certain existing deal ("Peace Pearl") that would help modernize the PLA's airforce to continue based on the requests of certain well-connected military contractors.

But in 1990, China cancelled the deal unilaterally, despite it being the only access they had to Western military tech. Ultimately it went with Israeli and Russian sources. Why? The US arms exporters were running into massive cost overruns and development delays. China thought it was some kind of intentional sabotage, but it was nothing of the sort: it was just the general fucked-upness of American military procurement running into the realities of a culture unused to that level of fucked-upness.

An international arms embargo couldn't accomplish the disarmament of China of American weaponry, but the brokenness of the American arms industry could.

That would make a lot more sense if the competing militaries had the same problems.

Shifting the power balance is unlikely to result in a safer world for most.

That is unless we all sign paperwork saying we won't use these big huge wastes of GDP we've stockpiled like someone with a hoarding complex, and resume war as usual.