Hacker News Reader

Comment by omginternets | Hacker News Reader

>We already have armies at the country level

I say the following as a former officer in the French army, which I'm sure you'll agree is one of the more active armies in the EU. We nominally have country-level armies. Their funding is consistently reduced and their numbers regularly downsized, and this trend exists across Europe. One might nitpick by pointing to specific budget increases, but the trend is undeniable if you look at it on any reasonable time-scale.

I can think of no European country that has an autonomous standing army, capable of deploying itself to the theater of operations, resupplying and sustaining combat efforts without the support of US logistics. To point at the mere existence of national armies is to play word games. The EU members have outsourced their defense to the United States, and are now paying the price.

EDIT: to be clear, I am quite skeptical of an EU strategic command.

View on HN

The reason is simple: you need extensive logistics support for expeditionary warfare. European states are not really structurally placed to engage in this kind of thing: ever since the Suez crisis, it's been obvious that we basically live in an US world order, and doing expeditionary stuff without the American's say-so is a bad idea. So, since you're going to need American permission anyway, you may as well plan on relying on their capabilities.

Ignoring the fact that the Suez crisis was largely a turning point for the English, your argument is circular. The entire point is that we need to re-invest in these capabilities to some degree.

> your argument is circular.

How so? The Suez invasion didn't fail because the British (or the French) didn't have the logistics to supply their forces. It failed because the US wasn't OK with it happening.

The point is, France could build whatever expeditionary force it could fit within its national budget, and it would still be completely useless for national strategic interests, because you could only really use it if the Americans agree you could use it. Thus, it would just end up doing stuff that fits in with American strategic imperatives.

The French do have an expeditionary force, and they are not even shy about using it - they deploy to African states as a matter of routine, in practice, without any US involvement or say in the matter (afaik). But it has become increasingly clear that effective conventional warfare is now reserved, in practice, to superpowers - and even them have trouble with it, as seen in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine - because of the scale of the challenge.

> The French do have an expeditionary force, and they are not even shy about using it - they deploy to African states as a matter of routine,

Yeah, I was kind of glossing that over. I don't know if French military involvement in Africa has been particularly helpful to France, and it seems less likely still that it has been helpful to Africans (with a few exceptions, Jean-Bedel Bokassa comes to mind).

I think you're underselling the effectiveness: there have been many post-colonial interventions by european forces that have ended in the european's favour. Sri Lanka's genocidal suppression of the Tamils, for example, or the propping up of Bahrain.

The broader point is, at no point do these actions run against US interests.

> I don't know if French military involvement in Africa has been particularly helpful to France

A number of African countries continue to store their reserves in France and work with the CFA Franc, which makes it worth it.

> there have been many post-colonial interventions by european forces that have ended in the european's favour

Yeah, but they are all in the past. It's today's news that the French failed in Mali. The combination of increasingly-difficult asymmetrical warfare (with guerrilla becoming more and more effective) and practical cuts to national budgets make such interventions increasingly ineffective. If even the superpowers cannot pacify medium-sized nation-states anymore, individual states have no realistic chance to achieve anything alone.

Some of those countries will probably diversify their reserves into a broader mix of foreign currencies and precious metals. Recent sanctions against Russia have shown that no state can really rely upon reserves stored in a foreign bank. Access to those can be blocked with the stroke of a pen.

> If even the superpowers cannot pacify medium-sized nation-states anymore, individual states have no realistic chance to achieve anything alone.

My sort of uninformed reading of the problem in Mali / Sahel desert insurgencies is just that the French didn't do a very good job at a strategic level, which isn't really the military's fault.

It strikes me that most of the western debacles have been essentially down to a pretty thin understanding of how to discover and support regional partners. There's no quantity of bombs or boots that would make the Afghan kleptocratic torture state command a plurality of support, and worse, the Americans were temperamentally incapable of building bridges with the kind of people that could form a stable government.

My feeling is that resources aren't the problem: the problem is that (for a number of reasons) western policy making elites are just making the wrong decisions, both in terms of how ambitious their projects are (the post-invasion Iraq project was insane), and in terms of who they choose to work with.

If you take Iraq for example, the US chose to marginalize Iran early on, despite the fact they would have been (practically speaking) a great partner, who were more than willing to involve themselves in Iraqi regime change.

I think modern armies don't want to do "what it takes" for total subjugation like used to happen with armies in earlier wars. They didn't fight in cities because they razed them to ground and killed everyone there militant or citizen. Thus wars drag on for decades. I am not for that kind of warfare, but total war is the only way those types of wars are won. There is no humanitarian outreach or talks.

>France could build whatever expeditionary force it could fit within its national budget, and it would still be completely useless for national strategic interests, because you could only really use it if the Americans agree you could use it.

You have that exactly backwards. The French expeditionary force can only be deployed with American approval because it requires American logistics. If this were not the case, you would have something approximating Russian expeditionary capabilities.

> You have that exactly backwards.

No, my point is that the Suez crisis proves that even if you do have logistical independence, it doesn't matter, because the US can crash your economy and excoriate you in the UN if you do something they don't like.

The US didn't single-handedly crash the British economy during the Suez crisis, and it wasn't a pure logistical/political defeat in the field, either. In fact, it was very much a military defeat, as well. The British defeat was the sum total of all these parameters rather than any single one. By contrast, France's ability to apply military force is interdicted by precisely one parameter: logistical dependence on the USA (worsened by the US' underhanded acquisition of Alstom, I might add). As such, I don't think your point stands.

You keep on referring to it as a british defeat, but it was a joint effort between britian and France :). Iirc, the US didn't need to crash the british economy, they simply threatened to devalue the pound, denounced the invasion publicly, then the europeans called a ceasefire (unilaterally? I'm not sure).

At no point in either the french nor the british military operations do you see either tactical defeats or supply issues.

It is precisely the decades after decades resignation to "US number 1" that maintains this status quo!

There is no inherent weakness of Europe. It has far more people than the US. All that welfare state makes it far more efficient too in many matters.

A little "Military Keynesianism" would, frankly, be really good for solving Europe's problems of higher unemployement and whatnot too. I am generally against such things, but the welfare states make the risk of runway jobs guarantees and military industrial complexes less bad.

In general, Europe missed out on Keynesianism it seems (the military or non military varieties). 70+ years of welfware states is being undone by stupid austerity. They figure out how to be good to the poor (unlike US) and not do austerity (like the US, despite what you may think), and they should leap ahaed of us.

The "US-lead world order" is Europe's choice.

If you look at GDP charts, the US is very dynamic in comparison to the EU. I think the EU is a better model, but when it comes to raw economic, military and diplomatic power, there's no comparison.

If you go back to the decades in which the US became the world hegemon (post-war era) the difference is way more stark. It's not that the EU resigned - it's that the US muscled them out!

Europe was rebuilding after WW2 and it only started presenting a somewhat united front 30 years ago.

The EU is barely a confederation, let alone a federal state.

But that is precisely because a lack of autonomous spending in the EU!

One theory is that in Europe in the 1980s, workers became so much more empowered that the private sector lost the will to invest. Start with https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf for the basic concept here, but there are many more examples.

A VAT-funded balanced budget welfare state is a purely redistributional mechanism which, while great, is not sufficient to undo this sort of thing.

Direct government spending like the military sort is a way around this. Maybe the workers are militant, but will the democracy just allow itself to decline military because you don't feel like dealing with that?

Workers vote too, so I don't think so.

I don't know. It seems to me that compared to every other form of state spending (roads, healthcare, etc), military spending is conspicuously poor in terms of return on investment.

I think the US is a very weird state - it's probably the most consistently old-school liberal state in the world, it has negligible worker activism, colossal natural resources, and its position as world hegemon gives it all sorts of non-imitable economic advantages. I don't think you can copy the US if you're not the US - the closest in terms of economic policy is the UK, and the UK economy is kind of like a corpse in a bin bag.

> A little "Military Keynesianism"

Is how a military industrial complex starts. Then it seeks to justify its existence by either meddling everywhere.

I address that will the welfware state helping: industrial complexes are surprisingly grassroots in the United States, because if you loose your job you are so fucked.

If people simply don't need jobs as much, on the margins, it's much easier to have healthy conversations about what investment is actually good, vs what is just make-work or worse.

Just because the Americans have this problem doesn't mean the rest of the world is doomed to have it as well. I submit that there is a significant cultural element at play, here: Europeans have known war at home in a way that the US never has, and are much less gung ho about military power. In fact, you might even argue they are gun shy to a fault, so it seems unlikely that this slippery slope will cause actual slippage.

> I can think of no European country that has an autonomous standing army, capable of deploying itself to the theater of operations

That has been intentional. Deploying forces outside your borders is what empires do. It's out of scope for the military forces of ordinary countries.

Most military forces only exist to defend their own territory. For most West European countries in the past 20-25 years, the only realistic threats were their neighbors and the US. Because all of those were allies, the primary purpose of the military was maintaining the readiness to scale up in case the world becomes more dangerous again.

It will be interesting to see what will become of Europe now that Germany has decided they are allowed to act like an empire once again.

What have seen since WWII is that military attacks are extremely hard. Just about all successful missions have support of the local population in the attacked countries.

Yes, the US can take over countries like Iraq or Afghanistan. And then what? Is there any net gain for the US? On the other hand, NATO bombings in former Yoguslavia led to a situation that is still more or less stable today.

Russia quickly took over Crimea, which has strategic value and has support of the local population. But now they are stuck with a nasty and costly war in Ukraine.

So it is not clear where in the world Germany would play 'empire'.

I wonder to what extend an army can maintain an effective defence if there no need for any defence for many decades. Many western European countries have not been attacked since the end of WWII.

The FFL is quite independent in terms of logistics, no? They recruit right out of my alma mater, the US Marines.

What you're describing is taught to us as the difference between an occupying force and an expeditionary force. Occupying forces don't really need to be trained on seizing forward air bases because someone else does that. That kind of army functions a lot more like well-armed police. The Marines has a different decree, which holds most units at a high level of unit readiness because the president has the capacity to deploy them for 30 days at any given time. We operated most battlefield functions as internal jobs, aside from ships logistics, and cross-training is heavily emphasized to combat cost. Interestingly enough, the Marines is the smallest and least funded branch in the armed forces - so it would appear the difference is primarily in culture, logistics, and tactics.

Edit:

All this said, we operated and trained with British, Korean, Aussie, and Dutch military components that had and trained on these capabilities.

> cross-training is heavily emphasized to combat cost.

Could you unpack that? I don’t know what you mean, but it sounds interesting.

The USMC works hard on cross-training to reduce costs, meaning that they can go out and complete short term objectives using fewer guys than other groups might need.

Just to build on this a little:

My MOS was a 2844, which was a Ground Radio Technician. I could repair and operate every radio the USMC had at an advanced level. I then received courses on how to provide EMT-level care on the battlefield, machine gunners school, vehicle operations (command, gunning, operation, egress, maneuvers), basic generator troubleshooting, vehicle maintenance training, artillery/medevac coordination, advanced SatComm training, etc... This is specifically so that teams are a) self-sustaining (one team can accomplish many jobs outside of their primary job) and b) to reduce the number of on-hand resources the USMC requires to function.

>The FFL is quite independent in terms of logistics, no?

I guess that depends on what you consider to be logistical independence, but at the theater scale, the answer is "no". Physically moving personnel and materiel to Africa, say, is almost always handled by the U.S. Air Force to a very large degree. See for example, Operation Serval.

I'm not entirely certain, but it seems that French operations in Mali were done with some German and British logistic help ( but nothing France doesn't have), and the US didn't participate.

There are lots of Americans who agree with you and would LOVE to see Europe get better at this stuff and take a load off of our national expenses and bank accounts :) .

The US has a big military-industrial complex. A capable EU-army might result in a focus on weapon production in the EU. Quite a loss for US industries.

You're probably wrong on the effects though. I don't see the us defense contractors and arm producer accepting that much of a cut in their budgets. Also, an unified eu defense force would undercut a lot of military contracts between EU state and us companies, and the loss of customer in this market is quite hard to offset

Reply on news.ycombinator.com