9/5/2023 c6 Guest
Something we should keep in mind is that things are not as simple as you want to make it seem. The US's interventionism has screwed things up, but we've helped a lot of people too. But I do think that the US should adopt a more isolationist and neutral stance, like Switzerland. Of course, people will argue that we're abandoning our allies, but we can't keep being the world's policeman. Before World War I, we had a small standing army and believed in the idea of the "citizen soldier," essentially militiamen or a National Guard. We should return to that somehow. By shrinking our Army by about half (or even more), and retaining about 2/3rds to 1/2 of our Navy and Air Force, we can still defend our homeland while spending significantly less money. In fact, we should probably fold the Air Force back into the Army. The Marines would serve as our embassy guards and as a quick response force for emergency situations involving U.S. citizens. The Coast Guard would expand and receive a budget increase for modernization, as their main role is to patrol U.S. waters anyway. These last two are the smallest (not counting the Space Force) branches of the Armed Forces and are the least costly. In fact, the Navy and Marine Corps draw from the same budget pool (that allocated to the Department of the Navy). Of course, we'd retain our nukes as a deterrent. I don't know, but I think that would be an improvement over our current situation. Eisenhower warned of the "military-industrial complex," and he had a point.

4/27/2022 c1 Josh
Bring back the old story..

11/21/2021 c3 5PoofyOhio
I remember reading the original Manifest Destiny. When I read the fate of Afghanistan you depicted in the original, of us abandoning it and the Taliban taking over, I remember thinking “that’s crazy! That’ll never happen” and I thought you to be writing some pretty far fetched things.

Then it actually fucking happened.

Suffice to say, I look at the things you write in a different light than I once did.

Anyway, this rewrite is fantastic so far.

4/6/2021 c7 5Dom2040
Thank you for writing this story! This is truly unique and awesome!

3/23/2021 c7 gryphus-On3
Heh, good to see Gunsel making an appearance.

3/23/2021 c7 3last admiral
Just want to tell you something; pre-modern settlements (villages/town) were built close to each other, due to the speed of horse/food, lacking efficient food perservation tech to transport food at long distance, and safety. Therefore, instead of wide green grass field as far as eye can see, Itami and his RT3 should seen rows of burned down villages, farms, slave-powered farms estates, instead when they travel to Italica. Because it didnt make sense that a measly partially burned farm field just outside Italica's wall can feed the city itself, nevermine producing enough food to be the Empire's breadbasket, not when we only seen a grassfield around Italica and not a single farms.

Also, some intersting note about Gate from other forum:
>"Gate's nationalism really goes beyond even the silly "X country saves the day" tropes you can expect in technothriller novels written to showcase a certain technology or entire army in a specific scenario.

In Gate, the JSDF is depicted as a universally good organization when it projects power onto a weaker polity and "liberates" populations in an arrangement that will effectively make them Japanese economic colonies. This basic rundown doesn't even get to the heart of really weird and uncomfortable subtext of how it portrays the rest of the world in ways consistent with Japanese right-wing paranoia dating back to Meiji to Showa Imperialism. The United States is an aggressive and disorganized mess of "lesser races" trying to control Japan. Russia is an ineffectual and greedy competitor who will be defeated by GLORIOUS NIPPON FIGHTING SPIRIT. Europe is a mess of rough equals who will be dragged by the other two into fights they can't win. Japan alone is depicted as the one civilization which will be good for the other side of the Gate, which is a pretty well-worn justification for colonialism on "primitive" cultures.

Normally one could say this is reading too much into too little, but the author's opinions are out there online which makes it impossible to avoid looking at how Gate seems to advocate by allegory for a soft restoration of Japan to an imperialist hegemon over East Asia. Pacifist and anti-imperialist politicians are forced by the plot to be idiotic and stand in the way of the military which is consistently the true engine of progress, and thus one is given the impression that the only effective leadership Japan needs is a decentralized and ambitious military whose officers get to go on their own little colonial adventures carving up weaker territories.

This isn't an American flag waving in the background while the PotUS gives a speech so the world can shoot down alien motherships. This isn't a French film showing the last stand of Napoleon's Old Guard as significantly more heroic than it actually was while Le Marseillaise plays. This isn't raising the Red flag over the Reichstag as the Nazis are finally defeated. This is using a fantasy world and the author's ability to twist the text to fit his view of reality to engage in vicarious hero worship of an organization which has consistently shown an institutional dislike of what he advocates for, all while recalling the worst excesses of Japan's leap forward into the modern world and the atrocities which still affect its diplomatic relations to this day.

The author of Gate, and by extension the work itself, contends that there was and is nothing wrong with the Japanese military assuming an active role in government and using its power to project a supposedly superior culture onto those who cannot meaningfully resist."

>"In comparison, the JSDF occupied the Special Region in all but name and conducted military acts, as well as borderline colonization (You can't tell me that the Alnus Base isn't basically a japanese colony at this point, as there are Falmartians living under japanese law) mostly without international consent, blessing or even knowledge, despite the gravity of the entire situation."

9/25/2020 c5 aznxa21
Huh didn't know this got rewritten. Well, sleep is overrated.