The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities
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I once read an article that argued in the absence of war, it's impossible to tell if a doctrine or commander is good or not.
Maybe you've got five officers up for promotion. One officer wants to give soldiers high-tech equipment, a heads-up display in every helmet and a grenade-dropping drone in every backpack.
One officer wants to train loads of soldiers as linguists, so they can win hearts and minds in any country they might occupy.
One officer wants to focus on PR at home, as maintaining a steady supply of cash and adventurous young men is key to winning any conflict.
One officer wants to cut bureaucracy and red tape, as every individual in a support function is someone not in a front-line function, and it's front line fighters that win battles.
One officer thinks the important thing is physical conditioning and classic soldiering - Marching, marksmanship, long hikes carrying heavy backpacks.
How do you decide who to promote, if it's 30 years since you were last at war and none of them has ever won a real battle?
Each of these commanders may be better suited to a different conflict. The commander who is competent in one conflict may be a buffoon in a different conflict.
Even winning battles doesn't necessarily set up a commander for success. If your enemy changes between conflicts (say, going from a near-peer adversary to an insurgent adversary, a-la-Gulf War 1 -> Gulf War 2, or insurgency to near-peer, a-la Russia-in-Chechnya to Russia-in-Ukraine), radically different strategy, operations, and tactics are required.
I think this goes a long way to explaining the old saying "everyone prepares to win the last war." It boils down to "this guy did good last time, he'll do good this time too" when what helped him the last time is a very specific way of thinking that is not applicable now.
TL;DR: Responding to Change over Following a Plan
Although you can kinda benchmark, i.e training exercises, that allow you to test people physically and technically, but it's a really poor analogy, because it's not feasible to test people emotionally and mentally to the stresses of a real life scenario without having a real life scenario - its possible to simulate, but not ethical, it would be far too dangerous to the individual and the people running the scenario.
As I understand it (or surmise), the trick is that the drone operator sees your squad and its surroundings. So he can give you a shout, “Yo! People in the bushes forward to your left, eighty metres!”. You as the squad commander aren't doing the filtering on that channel, it's self-prioritizing.
> And if you are unlucky and blessed with the right kind of leadership some staff officer in some remote hq will start to micromanagement you.
Hmmyeah, sounds familiar... Aliens, with the Lt. back in the ship[1] directing his Space Marines and Ripley, right?
___
[1]: Or was he in the ground vehicle, that long low truck(ish) thingy with the ridiculously non-existent ground clearance? Been too long and I'm too old, can't remember.
I would argue even more drastically that, a commander or doctrine is only as good as the war they are in. I mean that every conflict has the capacity of developing so differently that even a tested commander or strategy is suspect. Historically, conflict during a period was more homogenous. Having a war every 5 to 10 years would keep your officer corps relatively relevant. Only in large empires with a huge variety of martial interests would we see commanders succeed wildly in one engagement and utterly fail in another.
But modern wars swing suddenly from guerilla, to conventional, to insurgent, to cold with such rapidity that command experience is profoundly difficult to rely on as a predictor of success.
Probably the wisest way to promote in a modern military is to use all your standard expectations in peacetime. Who is organized, dutiful, etc. But maintain the knowledge that once shit hits the fan, you will be moving people around based largely on success. Which is what happens in real full blown conflicts. France in WWI is a good example.
The much harder question is how do you measure performance in non-conventional wars?
"Here are the parts of a full solution, pick a favorite to the exclusion of others."
So... Probably the one that despite a specialty has the greatest strength in all the others. Certainly one who appreciates all the others as well as the other aspects you didn't mention
Mind you much of it was political: "we're about to occupy a country where 20 million people want to kill us" would have sounded pretty awful at the State of the Union.
As one example, at the start of the war in Afghanistan, Marine scout snipers would operate in two-man teams. This was a Vietnam-era SOP that favored stealth over firepower--two men can't lay down much heat, but they don't need to if the enemy can't find and engage them. It's pretty easy to hide a couple guys in a jungle, so it worked well.
The problem with that doctrine in Afghanistan is that hiding even two men is difficult in arid environments. A team is far more likely to be seen regardless of its size and needs to be able to defend itself if compromised, which happens far more often in a desert. By 2010 the SOP was 8-man teams. At least one bloody incident was the cause of those numbers being bumped up.
There's a saying that rings true, "The military is always fighting the last war".
Changing organizational processes tends to be extremely hard in large orgs, and I wonder how the military deals with it.
It's worth noting that this was one of many incremental changes. When I started that deployment in 2009, snipers were going out in 5-man teams. The team that got hit actually did technically consist of 8 men (as was already the SOP), but they were split into two four-man elements that took different positions about a kilometer apart. The mandate going forward was that all 8 team members had to be within earshot of each other at all times. It was the latest of many orders in the trend of ratcheting up firepower at the cost of concealability.
The incident you're talking about happened much earlier, in Iraq. I believe this article is referencing it: https://www.dvidshub.net/news/6921/former-magnificent-bastar...
It doesn't say they fell asleep, because of course there's no way to know that. It's an assumption that has been repeated as fact, though it does seem likely.
It's a saying that people in the military are well aware of (OEF Veteran here). We were well aware of what happened in Vietnam with counterinsurgency. The problem is that counterinsurgency just doesn't work unless you treat the country like an imperial colony. We didn't do that, in Iraq or in Afghanistan. It wasn't worth the resources to "do Imperialism" in those places, and so we got a half-assed "strategy" that wasn't really related to any seriously considered national objective.
>The problem with that doctrine in Afghanistan is that hiding even two men is difficult in arid environments.
The Taliban were able to do this with ease.
Same. That's where I heard it.
> The Taliban were able to do this with ease.
The Taliban weren't doing what we were doing. They generally did not, to my knowledge, go out and sit in an OP on a rocky hillside for 3-5 days straight, where any random goat herder might happen to decide to graze his herd one afternoon. Their MO was to set up an ambush that would be executed the same day and that was not likely to be discovered by a passing American, since Americans weren't wandering randomly through the hills at all times.
M4: a short barrel is easier to use in close quarters fighting, and this outweighs the loss of accuracy at longer distances.
In this specific case humvees were particularly ineffective against the IED-based warfare being conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan. Light, fast, vehicles are not particularly resilient to explosives.
Also, while the 20” battle rifle does provide superior ballistics for the 5.56 round, it’s unwieldy and there was a fair bit of CQB during the GWOT. 14.5” carbines were a sort of middle ground that could perform in both long range and short range engagements. Night time direct action raids by special forces even opt for shorter 10.5/11.5 barrels.
I recommend Jeff Gurwitch on YouTube he goes in depth into the history and rational behind equipment evolutions during the GWOT from a first hand perspective as an ex-SF soldier.
"Instead, the new incentive for most countries would be to build a military in a way that aims to minimize the political costs... it makes sense not to build an army for conventional operations but instead with an eye towards the kinds of actions which mitigate the harm caused by failed states: armies aimed at policing actions or humanitarian operations."
MRAPs exist to minimize the political costs (dead and wounded soldiers) in a policing action. When you look at conventional wars like Ukraine, HMMWVs remain very relevant in their doctrinal role.
The combat part was ok I guess, but what OP is pointing out was what we went to conflict with. Lots of money was spent upgrading Humvees with armor and turret mounts that didn't exist. The equipment fielded by US troops actually looked very different from a comparison of 2001 and 2005. Body armor went through development iterations, camouflage patterns, infantry equipment like magazine carriers and weapons optics, and so on.
Had the US tried to drive into the Afghan and Iraqi desert the way we did against fighters armed with heavier weapons and fighting skills then the US losses would have been a lot higher.
The Iraqi military had more formidable equipment but was so ill-trained and the moral so low that it was very much a paper tiger.
I think people underestimate hiw much the US military has transformed over the two two-decade long conflicts. There have been striking changes both organizationally, culturally, and technologically.
I’m not a military and/or Iraq war expert so I don’t want to argue definitively, but I don’t think you can say US losses would have been significantly higher had the Iraqi army had heavier weapons and fighting skills — they’d have needed effective air defense, too.
I think the Ru-UKR war shows the vulnerability of contemporary air forces to air defense, however, and that Western/NATO forces themselves lack cost-effective short-range and medium-range air defense systems. The US Air Force fields exquisite weapons (“platforms”) and these may prove useless in a conflict like Ru-UKR. Or, perhaps, they’re good enough to overcome the difficulties that the Sukhoi/MiG-based air forces of either side have encountered. Hard to know.
Range and mobility in artillery systems also seems like a weak point for the US military. The Excalibur precision shell is very expensive but likely cost effective—one shot, one kill. But the US M777 towed howitzer costs ~$3.7M (titanium) while the French Caesar costs $5-6M and can outrange the M777 in addition to driving away immediately after firing.
The US has the M109 which can serve in some of the same roles the Caesar can.
Also, does France have much rocket artillery? That might play a factor in the requirements for other artillery systems.
Afghanistan may have been a different story.
Well they did have unbeatable prices on this red taint from a producer in… Germany. Yup. Some people are actually good at war.
It’s about misunderstanding new technology notably machine guns or to be even more correct a military career structure and organisation which prevented people who understood new technologies and try to shake the boat to rise in ranks while putting conservative officers in control of the army.
It isn't as if there was no war for a generation. The Russo-Japanese war in 1904-5 was precisely the kind of brutal industrial conflict that foreshadowed the horrors of WWI almost to a T.
But Western powers were mostly unwilling to learn from such a distant war, and lessons learnt by junior officers who observed the carnage closely weren't taken seriously enough.
Barrel length is important to velocity up to a point, but you can also tune other parts of the system to increase velocity out of shorter barrels (M855A1). However, that is far from the only consideration when discussing the ballistics of a cartridge. Projectile mass determines how stable the projectile is. The 5.56 projectile tumbles and cavitates when hitting soft tissue due to its low mass. However, that also means obstructions like foliage can cause it to destabilize in-flight and it is less effective at barrier penetration.
The one who is most flexible and has the best ooda loop when under pressure.
It may be that one side's OODA loop is dysfunctional - perhaps they have to wait on higher headquarters to respond, or has an indecisive leader - before acting and that introduces a delay that an opponent can take advantage of.
How to get a tighter OODA loop? Practice. And modeling/war-gaming in advance any potential actions so your responses become automatic. Or at least "good enough".
The US Navy did extensive wargaming at the Naval War College in the inter-war years, from after WW1 to about 1933. The results were extraordinarily valuable in the Pacific when WW2 came about. The strategic issues the Japanese had can be seen as the consequence of not gaming full campaigns (as opposed to putative "decisive battles").
Fascinating free book that motivated these comments:
https://www.history.navy.mil/research/publications/publicati...
"Between 1919 and 1941, the U.S. Navy transformed itself from a powerful if unsophisticated force into the fleet that won a two-ocean war. The great puzzle of U.S. naval history is how that was accomplished. This book argues that war gaming at the U.S. Naval War College made an enormous, and perhaps decisive, contribution."
A whole string of vital lessons were learned during the gaming, which I can go into if you like (or you can read the book.)
Most importantly, the game in 1933 showed that the "through ticket to Manila" version of War Plan Orange would not work. The capital ships would arrive there with underwater damage and no way to repair it. They'd have to go back to Pearl Harbor, or the west coast, to reach facilities that would allow repairs. In which case, what was the point?
After that part, US war plans in the Pacific involved island hopping, so forward bases could be obtained where repairs could be performed. This had a number of important downstream implications: amphibious assault against protected islands would be necessary, with the equipment, training, and doctrine that implies (these would go on to be applied in the various invasions in Europe, including D-Day). Mobile dry docks would be needed (the US led the world in these in WW2, including modular ones that could be hooked together to produce something that could service a battleship.)
The need to fight across the Pacific implied ships would be up against land based planes in the Mandates (various island groups assigned to Japan after WW1). This meant carrier planes had to be on par with land based planes. The British did not learn this lesson and started the war with greatly inferior carrier planes (some of which were biplanes!)
The games illustrated that carrier operations needed to be optimized for rapid recovery of planes. The more rapidly planes could be recovered, the more planes a carrier could launch (and then recover before they ran out of fuel.) Capt. Reeves went on to command USS Ranger, where he pushed strongly to accelerate flight operations, eventually developing the system of landing planes before a wire crash barrier, then pushing them forward of the barrier to rest on the deck as more planes landed. This avoided the need to cycle the elevator(s) during landing operations. The US Navy was the only navy doing this at the start of the war. Fueling and reloading, even storing, aircraft on the flight deck was a natural extension of this. As a result, US carriers could carry more aircraft than those of other navies; they were not constrained by the size of the hangar.
The games showed that carriers were vulnerable to damage to their flight decks from even small bombs, and that there would be great value in the context of a campaign if this damage could be repaired by the ship's crew. This led the US to designs where the flight deck was unarmored, made of wood on a steel framework. USS Enterprise could not have participated in many of the carrier battles of the war (and the US would have lacked any carrier at the final climactic battle off Guadalcanal) had this not been the case. The British, in comparison, had armored flight decks, which meant after any damage to them they needed to go to a repair facility.
The circular formation used in carrier task groups in the war was developed in the games.
The games showed there would be great attrition of aircraft and aircrews. This meant the fleet had to be backed up by a very large pilot training program, as it was. The Japanese never understood this implication (at least, until it was too late) and failed to implement a scalable pilot training program, nor adequate pilot recovery efforts, and suffered from catastrophic decline in effectiveness as their first team pilots were lost.
The games showed the importance of scouting. Various ways of doing this were tried, eventually leading to investment in flying boats (which also were imagined as bombers, although they were overshadowed in that respect.)
(Of course, perhaps the most famous unlearned lesson from the Fleet Problems was the vulnerability of Pearl Harbor... the Navy simulated a surprise carrier attack on Pearl Harbor two or three times, each time it was wildly successful, and still the defenses weren't beefed up before December 7).
Some of the lessons learned in the table games about carriers were before the Fleet Problems could have learned the same lessons, due to the carriers not yet being available. Indeed, one of the issues the games were addressing was just what kind of carriers should be built. I expect any solution the NWC games came up with that could be verified in the FPs would have been. Also, the fleet problems would have provided vital inputs to the enhance the rules the NWC games used.
Other unlearned lessons (from NWC): the importance of unrestricted submarine warfare (this had been ruled out in the games because the British were assumed to be neutral, so not targeting their ships strongly constrained what the subs could do), the importance of night battles (the USN failed to train adequately for these and suffered greatly in the Solomons for it), kamikazes (the games assumed the Japanese would have an adequate pilot training pipeline and not have to resort to this), and what would be necessary to get Japan to surrender (politics in Japan was out of scope.)
I think that's correct. And I have 2 examples, one that proves it, and one that disproves it.
The first example is the Royal Navy in the 19th and early 20th century. The master of the seas. In the absence of any real competitor, how was it supposed to stay in shape? Well, it was hard, it was little by little metamorphosing into a paper tiger. Admiral George Tryon [1] tried to reshape it again into a Nelsonian navy, but he died in the sinking of HMS Victoria in 1893 [2], one of the most consequential events in the history of the world. And one of the most unknown. With Tryon dead, the Royal Navy promoted people like John Jellicoe or David Beatty, one a perfectly competent officer with all the right technical knowledge, but with roughly zero fighting spirit, and the other a raging lion of a man, but too good to bother with the details of how to actually command a fleet. But how would the Royal Navy create an organization where the right people would get promoted, if there was noone to "keep them honest" ?
My second example, or counterexample is the pair that was the exact opposite of Jellicoe/Beatty. It was King/Nimitz. I would argue that this was the most fortunate pair of boss/subordinate in the history of naval warfare. King was as aggressive as Beatty, or more. The ultimate no-nonsense guy, hated by many because he was so frank and intolerant to fools. We owe King the decision to follow Midway with Guadalcanal, and then to keep Japan on the ropes from that point on until the end of the war. But of course, nobody remembers Ernest King today, because one thing is to have the idea, another one is to execute. And Nimitz was the one who executed flawlessly. In my book, Midway is well ahead of Trafalgar or Tsushima. At both Trafalgar and Tsushima you had a better fleet obliterating the worse one. But at Midway, it was the underdog that won. And won because Nimitz put all the pieces of the puzzle in the right place ahead of time. Replace Nimitz with Nelson, or Togo, or Yamamoto, and the US loses at Midway. But Nimitz did it, and with it basically won the war in the Pacific.
My puzzle is this: how was it possible for a nation at peace to create an organization like the US Navy that promoted Ernest King and Chester Nimitz (and Spruance, and Halsey)? I don't have an answer.
- US flew quite a number of sorties that weren’t directly effective, at high casualties, to delay and “stuff up” the Japanese fleet
- US use of kamikaze attack rattled the Japanese command
- Miles Browning wrote a paper about exactly the tactic used at Midway against the Japanese [1]
You can (and the US did) shuffle commanders as needed — but you can’t suddenly create enlisted to do the dirty work or experts with the right ideas. Those require existing culture. Similarly, with a robust industrial base, you can pivot your manufacturing efforts (eg, battleships to carriers) — but you can’t build entirely new factories of skilled workers very quickly (eg, US struggles to build shells for Ukraine).
Perhaps this is a simplistic view, but I don’t think you can have the right military at the start of a conflict; you can only develop a robust, rapidly adaptable military base. That is, you can only make the military anti-fragile.
My advice would be to ignore the admirals (since you can always get new ones), and instead focus on quality NCOs, junior officers, and economics: they’re the backbone/framework of any future victory.
After that, it'll be back to leading charges of soldiers equipped with sticks and stones. I imagine any idiot will be able to figure that out.
Edit: My mistake, I thought you were talking about Deveraux’s theory, but it looks like you were talking about the Economic Stability Theory OP mentioned.
So for countries that lose the economic competition, might war be a 'better' option?
Vietnam doesn't invalidate the long peace, no. At least I'm not aware of any academic arguments to that effect, they may exist, I haven't studied this stuff since college.
1) It takes time for countries to break old habits when it comes to war.
2) Probably most important for WW1, the personal wealth of monarchs is in the lands they own, not the industries their tax-payers own. And this source of wealth, prestige, and vertical mobility is also of immediate importance for the upper classes in a monarchy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Nelson%2C_1st_Viscount...
Very few of these monarchies exist now. Many of them fell in the aftermath of WW1, and some of the big remaining ones fell in the aftermath of WW2. A positive of this is that now the remaining monarchies see war not as a means to extending their wealth, but, if on the losing side, as a means to ending them entirely. This didn't use to be the case, as previously losing monarchies might be given the opportunity to fold into the conquering monarchy as a subordinate power or noble.
> If anything, I think cultural values have lagged, resulting in countries launching counter-productive wars out of cultural inertia (because it’s ‘the doing thing’ or valued in the culture) long after such wars became maladaptive. Indeed, I’d argue that’s exactly what Russia is doing right now.
Hitler started WW2 to annex Ukraine because of its fertile soil. Basically he wanted colonies without the inconvenience of dealing with the sea. Like soviets and Americans had.
Shortly after WW2 it ceased to make sense to invade for farming land.
It's not the only factor (nukes are another), but it is a very significant factor.
Ukraine wasn't a distinct state then. There were many many factors involved [0]
That has no relevance.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that we should be very very careful treating the wars like they were unrelated incidents. They absolutely were not.
Perhaps the declining role monarchs across the world was a causal factor there -- countries of citizens trained to live with a highly authoritarian structure, who because of prior experience gravitated towards fascism/communism (also highly authoritarian)
Ehh......
WWI is complicated, but it essentially boils down to a great power war caused by a breakdown in relations that reached the point that diplomats were unwilling or incapable of keeping the war from breaking out. The result of WWI was that all of the traditional great powers (both those who won and lost) were spent [1]. The peace treaty sought to see the victors compensated by the losers, and part of the compensation was breaking them up in the vain hope that this would make war less likely, with some parts being carved up into independent countries, and others (especially colonies) being annexed to the victors.
WWII isn't so much a single war as it is four (sets of) wars of naked territorial aggression (Germany, Italy, Soviet, and Japanese) and two civil wars (China and France) that got merged into a single conflict by the fact that everyone ended up aligning into one side or the other. These wars don't start just before WWI; in many cases, the territorial jealousies that precipitate the war can't start until after WWI (e.g., how can Russia start seeking to invade its neighboring countries when they're still part of Russia?).
In between these two conflicts is a very large series of civil wars and revolutions and failed revolutions that are largely born from the instability of the international political sphere following the exhaustion of all great powers in WWI. These (relatively) smaller conflicts provide a more or less continuous segue between WWI and WWII, to the point that it may be better to just think of the period from 1914 to 1949 as a modern Thirty Years' War that sees the world shift from a balance-of-power regime involving the major European powers to a world that involves just two superpowers and their alliances.
[1] The US was the only major country not economically devastated by the war, but despite its economic size, its unwillingness to participate in European affairs means it's not really a great power as far as people at the time were heavily concerned--it doesn't enter the stage until WWI.
A weak showing by the European aristocrats. Clueless bunch.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchies_in_Europe#Territori...
1. Just before WW2 the Haber Bosch process ... was invented
2. for fixing atmospheric nitrogen into fertilizers/explosives
3. (same thing basically).
4. Shortly after the war it was widespread,
5. and since then there was no starvation in any developed or even semi-developed country.
6. Hitler started WW2
7. to annex Ukraine
8. because of its fertile soil.
9. Basically he wanted colonies
10. without the inconvenience of dealing with the sea.
11. Like soviets and Americans had.
12. Shortly after WW2
13. it ceased to make sense to invade for farming land.
14. It's not the only factor (nukes are another), but it is a very significant factor.
How often has the US been at not-war in that period?
EDIT: although to be clear, the last time I checked, I believe the stats still back up that overall fatalities from military conflict have been at historic lows. I generally prefer what little Hegemonic Stability there may be to the multipolar shitshows of the early 20th and mid-to-late 19th centuries.
Certainly wars between great powers and much smaller countries are more peaceful than near-peer wars.
Nope. Any reasonable person will accept an argument about how things are peaceful in relative terms. Factoring in everything and not cherry-picking.
Demanding perfect peace would be way too idealistic.
The argument can't be about overall fatalities, but about overall conflicts (and the numbers/proportion of people involved in such). Medical and sanitation technology alone has dramatically decreased the human-life cost of war, at least in proportion to total population.
you're actually saying that any war is OK as long as the USA starts it.
it's an expression of: "do as the USA tells you to do; do not do what the USA itself does"
the 'grown up view' is that there are trade-offs. the USA is an empire... I define the essence of an empire to be: a group of people from one place telling people from another place what to do. the most often thing they're told is to pay tribute (which by this point is part of a semi-obscure system of taxes, tariffs, technological transfers, and other hidden things)
And no one else really has this ability, take the Iraq War which was exceptionally vile - did the US get sanctioned for it? Nope, because sanctioning the US is basically shooting yourself in the foot. Even today it's still about a quarter of global GDP and a huge buyer of everyone else's stuff.
Bush Jr. has been convicted of war crimes in at least one country because of his actions with respect to the Iraq war: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35397/b...
Very few countries are opposed to the US invasion of Afghanistan, as those plotting the previous attack on the US were doing so from a position of sanctuary in Afghanistan at the time.
Wars of genuine self defense are basically automatically approved by standard international law: https://legal.un.org/repertory/art51.shtml
This hegemony is not actually so different from all of the empires that came before it.
WW2 was just before nukes, and also had actors like the Nazis that were completely off the spectrum - where they would eradicate or dominate opponents if they were to win.
We then saw the Cold War, where the Soviets and US never felt compelled to have an open confrontation because the costs were so high and the end goals of both sides weren't to conquer the other (just carve up the rest of the world as much as possible).
Now we're at China vs the US -- they are competing over future influence but the costs of confrontation are too high.
Putin/Russia thought the Ukraine thing would be a quick victory where the West would be too slow/split to act effectively in time and then they would solidify the new "facts on the ground" easily.
We don't, though. The article treats with this. In fact per capita deaths to state violence are down remarkably over the last century, all over the world. The perception, due to the reach of modern media, is that war is everywhere. But the truth on the ground is very different.
Two hundred years ago, almost everyone knew someone who died in a war, or saw a war come through their home. Now? It's a notable rarity.
On the other hand, there are countries that aren't necessarily within this hegemony, and anything from warlordism to outright nation state warfare is liable to be taking place.
Would the threat of getting humiliatingly curb-stomped by NATO have been enough to dissuade Russia from invading? Maybe, but it would certainly have provided more of a disincentive than the current state of affairs where Russia can use the threat of nukes to keep NATO at bay. I'd bet a hypothetical nuke-less Russia would have stayed in their own borders and been content to get rich off fossil fuels. On balance, the existence of nuclear weapons probably still prevents more wars than it starts, but Russia having nukes seems like an exception to the rule.
The Wikipedia article about both the long peace and hegemonic stability theory. Both mention 3 nain examples. The pax Romanica (Roman times), the pax Britannica (1820-1914) and the Pax Americana (1945-now).
The Pax Britannica happened after the industrial revolution was wide-spread. Only the Pax Romana was before the industrial revolution, and it was far from global.
I would suggest that perhaps the long peace is actually from 1820 till now. With both world wars serving as examples where the calculus against war was ignored, and then later proven correct. Which fits with the theory, which says 'industrial war isn't worth it'. If once in a while a big power decides to test that theory, or decides war is necessary for non-economic reasons, you get horrible wars.
Not to say that hegemonic stability theory is clearly wrong. Just to say that the 'industrial revolution means war isn't worth it theory' fits the Pax Britannica and Pax Americana quite well.
The problem is that the U.S. has a tiger by the tail: if they want to continue in this role, they'll need to step up spending to cold war levels to have a chance of taking on China. This has a tremendous cost, culturally and economically.
If they don't, we'll see (as we are seeing) increased global disorder and rearmament by, for example, European and Asian powers. This will likely lead to more wars in the future.
One thing I am certain of: humans didn't just spontaneously become peaceful after WWII. Some energy is being expended to maintain what passes for global peace, and that energy will have to continue being expended for any conceivable time scale.
I mean, even if there was no China. OK. Great. Now what? You've still got India giving Russia as many drones as Russia desires every month. Is India, or even South Africa for that matter, ever going to lose its ability to produce drones for Russia? No.
The essential problem is that we live in a multi-polar world. Multiple nations can sustain themselves. Multiple nations can arm themselves. Multiple nations can exert influence in arenas that previously only the West could exert influence. China, the US, India, Russia, the EU. All of these power centers are realities, and they all sometimes have conflicting agendas. We're even reaching a point where they need each other less and less. In fact, the linkages in terms of, for example, global trade at times may be driving some of the problems. (See climate change.)
I'm not sure we know how to operate in this world. We focus so much on one "adversary", and without fail, we end up in conflict with another of the global powers or civilizations. I think this is because of the strangeness of this environment to us. Ukraine is a good example. You could argue that we didn't even bother to understand India's position on this before we issued an edict regarding sanctions. An edict that India promptly ignored. That's kind of a tell tale sign that we didn't really understand the underlying environment. Worse, I'm not sure we even tried to understand it? Did anyone ever actually solicit India's input in any meaningful way? I'm not sure they did.
So as long as that lack of understanding persists, I'm pretty sure we'll continue to stumble from one crisis to the next. None of which will be the crisis we plan for.
The long peace doesn't refer to a period without wars. Just to a period with much fewer wars.
Seeing how casually people dismiss the possible effects of a war involving 10,000 of these weapons has caused me to re-evaluate things.
We should have am internationally sanctioned thermonuclear weapons demo every few years, at least once per decade, but less than annually. To remind everyone what's at stake.
Tip: Look for a channel called SciManDan on YT. He has regular debunkings on Flat Earth Fridays, and IIRC many of his Tinfoil Tuesdays are also, if not directly Flerf, at least Flerf-adjacent.
Funny thing is, I don't know if there are any Flat Earthers who refuse to use GPS positioning.
We’ve never had a decade without a nuclear test since the 1940s.
I think wilderness camping is the best counter to that kind of thing. Sounds unrelated, but it's one of the most visceral, instinctual ways to get people to remember the reality of physical consequences. Those consequences exist no matter how frustrating or stressful they may be to deal with. If you leave food out, it spoils/you have no food. If you can't find water, you have no water. If you don't sterilize the water/check the source, you get sick. There's no grocery store, no cops, no social media to get support from, no emergency deliveries, no doctor, no credit to extend... nothing but nature and what you carry on your back. If you screw up, you're screwed.
I only did a couple trips like that, but when I got back to highways, cars, skyscrapers, restaurants, etc, I appreciated how amazing it all is, and how it's basically all just a very, very big, complicated campsite that's been built up over a long time. Nothing manmade is a given, and the only thing keeping it together is us. Nature is way bigger than you, and there are no guardrails. If someone launches a nuke, it's not a strategy game or a movie. That's a cliff you don't want to walk anywhere near.
A one or two week backpacking trip in the middle of nowhere should be a graduation requirement, imo. Would have lots of benefits beyond just added perspective about the reality of physical consequences.
https://goo.gl/maps/MqkLCrLqNr4usuj29
Seems like we did enough of this already.
To use Venezuela as an example, the author says no one has tried to invade it (which is actually not even true, see below) but also the US has been imposing crippling sanctions for over 15 years in an attempt to punish the people and weaken the government.
Moreover there was a US supported coup attempt in 2002 and one basically cooked up entirely by the US in 2020 (Operation Gideon). This was a plan to actually invade the country by boat with a small force to try to take control of the government.
This is part of a pattern of behavior for the US in the 20th century. The book Washington Bullets does a good job cataloguing the various interventions of this form.
Economic warfare can resemble the sieges of traditional warfare. Yemen was blockaded "economically" to prevent food and medical aid from entering the country. Syrians were only getting an hour of electricity per day in recent memory because of economic strictures preventing them from importing oil. It can get pretty brutal.
It's economic, cyber, covert, cultural and other less noticeable sieges that cause collapse from the inside.
Deglobalization is an attempt to make war feasible because some strong countries feel like they are losing economic war and want to fall back on real war.
I'm sure most of us are aware of the gulags that China ran in 2022, in the most prosperous city like Shanghai, with welded doors, lack of food, arbitrary killing of pets, moving their own citizens against their wills to camps or cells with no running water and unsanitary conditions. with cries in tall buildings from families in the middle of night for food. If. you haven't seen these things, go watch it online. Imagine if somehow China succeeded, and that's most of humanity's fate.
I feel for those who don't get that they are supporting evil.
Btw, speaking of evil, China isn't giving up yet (Xi still have 10-20 years to live. free organ transplants from young Chinese, you know. high ranking politicians get them for free). It is producing destroyers at a massive rate, and will exceed # of destroyers that US has by 2040. Combined with the millions of disposable unemployed single young men, and there's still a chance that Taiwan would overwhelmed. and if Taiwan falls, the same strategy can be used to conquer Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Australia.
Bear in mind that China has pretty much no oil and these 055 destroyer boats are diesel&gas turbine powered. And the US has been slowly winding down military presence since the Cold War ended basically[1].
And lemme tell you, if Taiwan goes hot, there wont be any USN boats spare to patrol the Middle East -> South China sea route, and nobody would be angry if any oil tankers on that route go missing.
[1]: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/graph-of-the-week-why-flee...
Well, then they are lucky that Russia, now sanctioned by the West, has no choice but to sell all their oil to China, at discount prices.
Frankly highlighting China dependence on maritime trade is a cope. It just won’t matter much in hot war.
Nah. Ship.
Otherwise it's the common battle between "orderliness at any cost" and freedoms. US or Europe seems to strike a better balance, for all of their shortcomings. In China its ruled by the CCP with an iron fist.
Violence is the last resort of the incompetent.
I think that China is pulling on the US what the US did to the Soviet Union. The US bankrupted the Soviet Union with an arms race. China is doing it much more economically by spending 1/3 of the US. This is money that the US could be using to build a high speed rail network or educating its citizens.
"build a high speed rail network", implying that US is failing there. China is suffering from a $1 TRILLION debt for its rails https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/China-debt-crunch/C..., while ridership collapses https://japan-forward.com/weak-demand-for-chinas-high-speed-.... Cities in China are suffering from $23 TRILLION insolvent debt and inability to raise more https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-05-21/china-s-2.... I certainly hope US doesn't suffer the same fate.
Erasing debts wipes out (most) savings and hurts rich people. So it's not something that can be done lightly, but it is an option.
Also, Chinese HSR ridership is back up after COVID restrictions were lifted.
that's not how economics works. if that's the case, you would not see the Chinese governments (federal and local) doing desperate things to collect more revenues like:
- China considers measures to encourage re-employment of retirees https://hrmasia.com/china-considers-measures-to-encourage-re...
- issuing massive traffic/parking tickets a year after, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, to commercial and normal drivers
- banks preventing normal withdrawals of money. often, deceased's children can't withdraw their parents savings, even with all the official documentations
- government entities delaying several months of owed salaries to its employees https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5/11/chinas-cash-stra...
It is. You can erase all debts by hyperinflation, for example.
China for sure has problems, but it's not the "crashing down tomorrow" kind of problems. They still have a robust growth, now that COVID restrictions are over.
China is on its way out.
It's amazing how many racists come out in these threads.
China's population is projected to peak at 1.7B by 2060 and then fall to 1.5B by the century's end: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2023/04/24/c...
If anything, China is leading the world at trying to live with a static population numbers (and EVERYONE will have to do it eventually).
And a million realists(in the technical sense that IR people use the word) cried out in terror at once.
To the extent that there is any relationship, it is that countries sometimes try to avoid depending on trade with someone they may end up at war with soon; the causality works the opposite way.
No need to trade any goods if said goods can be just be taken (assuming one's side wins).
We are living in the pax Americana right now, but it is unclear how long that will last.
“Another” than what? This was exactly what TFA was about.
I’m getting such Beltway Think Tank vibes for some reason.
This particular take is basically a standard neorealist perspective on how to explain the impact of globalization in reducing conflict. Basically allowing that trade changes the playing field, without allowing that states might be anything other than selfish entities, or that there might be any relevant entities to consider in international affairs (like nonstate actors, cultural power, etc). Other schools of IR theory take different perspectives, but neorealism is basically the foundational view of western foreign policy.
Invading Iraq or trying to create democracy in Libya or getting Finland to join NATO is, basically, some attempt to create stability at a distance - as misguided and chaotic as the results may be. Engaging in actual, direct war the way Putin has would be unthinkable; it would be like taking your pants off at a dinner party.
[edit] I should clarify that the invading Iraq part of the above statement was meant as a bit of jest; obviously that was precisely what Putin has done.
[edit #2] the article's flaw isn't that it (rightly) locates the source of both peace and war in the profit-making capacities of companies and governments; the flaw is in its fanciful belief (and the subject of the piece) that this has somehow led to a neutered military situation of which the present Russian losses are proof. They are no proof, and the situation is more dangerous and ambiguous than ever, partially as a result of the ongoing neutering of one of the three important millitaries in the world at the hands of the most powerful alliance. Wish that it were not so, but this destabilizes what had up until now been a grouping that was mostly driven by profit.
But Libya was not in jest.
We didn't seek to conquer it, occupy it, or annex it. We did seek to support a popular uprising against a vicious dictator [edit: Something that we've unfortunately over-promised and failed to deliver on too many times, e.g. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Kurdistan, Hmong people, any war where the Pentagon seizes on a "third way"], but we did that based on a doctrine that security for ourselves needed democracy abroad, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. Let me make the alternative case for a second: Helping democratic movements in the ME/NA was a misguided proposition, as obviously the region has zero history of popular governance and the only actual alternative to authoritarian rule there on the ground is, and has always been, hardcore 7th century Islamism which is among other uglinesses and human rights abuses, deeply unfriendly to us. And therefore it was a fool's errand to overthrow any dictator in the ME, because they were the ones keeping the street quiet.
Okay, now that I've made that case, here's the case for helping overturn Qaddafi and try for Libyan democracy: He was murdering his own people. He had done, and he would do it again. And given the climate, his state would become again a breeding ground for terrorism as it had been in the 70s and 80s.
Personally, I think it was stupid, but I don't think it was wrong in the sense that Russia invading Ukraine was wrong - precisely because I don't think propping up a dictatorship is morally valid, the way Russia was propping up Ukraine before 2014 and the way it still does in Belarus and all the former Soviet states.
What I'm saying is that the moral decisions are frequently poor strategic decisions, and they rarely work in concert, but the failure of one doesn't nullify the other; nor do our strategic failures provide justification for the moral failures of others. If something is wrong then replicating it would also be wrong, no?
It’s like there is no need to even compose a reply. This philosophy is absurd on its face.
But I’ll just say that the US has supported dictatorial “regimes” (instead of overthrowing them, or fomenting a popular uprising).
(What if the US was in fact a capable superpower and not a bumbling, idiotic giant who whoopsies all of its attempt to to good? Because the war aims had nothing to do with spreading democracy.)
I don’t know whether you are blaming the populace for these wars or saying that they sabotaged them enough so that they didn’t become worse.
But in any case the difference between a nominal democracy and an outright authoritarian state isn’t that. The difference is that while an authoritarian state can just say that they want the oil and the resources of another territory, a nominal democracy has to at least somewhat pretend to be different and somewhat noble. Exactly because it has a very limited form of democracy.
And so you get people who unironically, completely sincerely, present the narrative of the US as a bumbling but loveable, kind of amnesiac, tries its best to be good, Destroyer Of The Third Reich, good ally to the good guys native-killing settler-colonial Taiwanese (they make chips?), oh we tried our best in Iraq except scratch that that was just in jest because no serious person could deny that that was anything less than an aggressive and unjustified war, but all the dictators we helped actively was just because they were better than the alternatives, except Gaddafi he was a piece of shit so Libya being a shithole and objectively worse off is okay because we tried our best fuck those scimitar barbarians.
Because that kind of narrative actually matters in a (nominal) democracy.
> Consider the opposite... a US with a government and foreign policy unmoored from popular attitudes and free to prosecute any and all imperial wars without internal resistance or dissent or risk of power changing hands every 4 years.
Yeah, then Congress would probably increase the military budget for the fifteenth time in a row (unlike now). Then being at war and continuing to dig into wars would probably be a “bipartisan issue”, no matter whether the power changes hands to Pepsi or Coke every four years (unlike now). Then the US military would probably be larger than a lot of of other nations combined (unlike now). Then the US military would probably have tons of bases around the world (unlike now). Then there would not be consequences for politicians and public servants who commit war crimes (unlike now). Then Barack Obama saying “we tortured some folks” would probably just be a meme-gaffe of no consequence (unlike now). Then the laughably anti-International Community American Service-Members' Protection Act would probably become a thing (unlike now).[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
But 200 years ago for a rich country to obtain a poor country's natural resources they had to invade an army and add it to their empire; while in the modern age, the rich country can swap the natural resources for pieces of paper they can print at will.
Why bother to invade under such circumstances?
For sports, this context is highly constrained to whatever game is being played and so its impacts are limited to the scope of that game and those involved with its orchestration/spectacle (definitionally!).
On the other hand, global trade is unconstrained by a specific range of activity (there are states with laws that try and combat this but ultimately money is money). This is much closer in effect to the "real" physical violence of war. By controlling an entity financially, you control that entities ability to exist in a financial context and so when that world of finance becomes the dominant form of interaction you are effectively enacting violence upon and limiting the expression of that thing (i.e. the conquest and subjugation of people/land but with money instead of swords).
In contemporary hyper-reality it is a common mistake to ascribe "unrealness" to things like money or the internet, in such a way that we can box out their effects from our understandings. Then, when those systems are employed to reinforce and/or expand existing hierarchies that layer of smoke and mirrors is able to effectively divert attention away from their _very real_ impacts. At the same time they become both non-things and the backdrop on which everything else exists.
"Just turn off the computer"
"Just don't purchase exploitative things"
"Just do your own research"
[Ad infinitum...]
These bits of rhetoric shift the unfathomable inertia of Things™ onto the shoulders of the individual, be it a person, organization or state without recognition as to why that entity is doing the thing that it is doing in the context of everything else that is doing something around it.
There is probably already a term for it but this seems to itself be a kind of logical fallacy ("ex homine"?) that collapses the scale of a problem down to the decision of an individual. Thus it enters the scope of opinion and so is unreal and unworthy of discussion or understanding. Nuance and complexity are shunted away systemically because complex solutions and understandings do not engage well with efficiency. Because things that are economically efficient are those things which can be spread through economics, even the ideas around what it means to be economic can be distorted by this effect in such a way to detach people further and further from reality while assuring them that they are the only ones that _really_ understand how the world works (in "economic" terms). It is a battlefield that is at war with all other battlefields--and it is winning.
I'm admittedly kind of annoying with the frequency for which I post it but I wrote a short paper that attempts to demonstrate how we got to that position over the last 12,000 years. This is the most relevant portion here from the Third Proposition:
----
"“Creating Markets/Value” (Inducing novel scarcity fears via public storytelling) becomes an optimized resource acquisition strategy, as monopolization of production is most efficient when the market “Creator” controls access to the new market from the outset, minimizing appropriation costs. “Investment capital” (Hoarded value) is used to generate these new markets at a sufficient scale, while the relative abundance of capital for the “house” (Investors) will allow the creators to impede competitors from the start, thus ensuring a maximum return on investment. Power law guarantees that existing resource hoards will forever seek returns and accumulate more into increasingly fallow pools of capital. Unrestrained “Free” competition, a reinterpretation of “might makes right,” then must represent the dogma behind forever growth." [1]
----
In a nutshell, people with a hoard of money will fund the creation of "New" markets. Think Meta with the "Metaverse", Apple with the "App store" etc... with the intention of being the monopolist of that market by virtue of creating it. They then propagandize extensively (marketing) to convince people that this new market has value that hasn't been extracted yet and IF YOU JOIN RIGHT NOW you can get a piece of that growing value as a new gold rush. People even use the same language here.
The problem is, only a handful of people can fund large scale new markets and they DEMAND monopolist exploitation capabilities within that new market. Like with Amazon and Reddit, part of the strategy is to delay exploitation significantly so as to bolster the monopolistic market position by pushing platform growth over all other metrics. That way when you flip the cash flow exploitation switch, nobody has anywhere to go and everyone just rolls over cause there isn't enough collective will to change behavior that was reinforced over a decade or more.
Seems a bit dismissive about the degree of revanchism in many former empires (or among people who imagine themselves the descendants of those empires).
Turkey, Iran, China, and Russia at the very least are all waiting for or working towards a world where territorial acquisition by conquest is the norm.
"We investigate the theses of “long peace” and drop in violence and find that these are statistically invalid and resulting from flawed and naive methodologies, ..."
https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf
Our technology is smarter than our politics. We will be lucky if we don't blow up everything.
I want to highlight that the main difference in my opinion is, and always was, that of attacking versus defending. Attacking is more often a clusterfuck of complexity and a constant process of messing up as opposed to defending a territory. When attacking you must have that critical 3:1 or 5:1 ratio in all aspects of employing your force, and it’s expected that mistakes will be made, losses will accrue and even grander failures will abound along the way. I would claim that even the Russians eventually adapt, albeit rather slowly, and so does anyone else. It’s about morale, motivation and will, and here it is likely that defenders have an upper hand.
In short, when attacking, be ready for a hell of a suffering in almost any case, except for when you have a hundredfold superiority in all facets of warfare, or alternatively, if you have stellar intelligence capabilities and the benefit of surprise when your enemy least expects it. And I’m not even talking about maintaining order after you’ve conquered a territory…
That is what the article is referring to when it talks about war being a lot more destructive--that if we choose to wage a total war, like we did in WW II, we can potentially destroy a lot more than at any time in human history. But the article is arguing that that very fact has prevented countries from trying to wage total war, because the costs now greatly outweigh the benefits. So the actual destructiveness of actual wars has gone down.
> If anything, it seems like war is much less destructive than it used to be, because weaponry and tactics are much more precise than they used to be.
I think this is true, but it's also true that more precise weaponry and tactics also change the goals of war. You can't conquer a country, or reclaim a country that someone else conquered, with low-level targeted munitions. But you can do things like eliminate terrorist leaders or take out particular dangerous capabilities (like the Israelis bombing Iraq's Osirak nuclear weapons plants) without having a major impact on the rest of the population. This kind of change is exactly what the article is describing when it says that democracies now have an incentive to build a military not for fighting a conventional war but for "the kinds of actions which mitigate the harm caused by failed states" (of which terrorism is one).
Now, I could pick some nits with that: crops are not that hard to destroy. But that just results in a few years of famine. On the other hand, a proper counterexample would be the Thirty Years War, but I don't know what the actual long term consequences for the northern German economy were.
Russia has had a similar strategy with other places since they started doing military campaigns 2008.
Second, this quote at the end:
> Consequently, I suspect Russia is not the only paper tiger out there; the forest is likely to be full of them.. the exceptions are likely to be.. or because they form the backbone of an international system which requires that someone carry a big stick (the United States).
Ultimately, US military dominance is good for US+LIO interests / serenity, but hard to extrapolate anything more. IMO multipolarity will increase the chance of "smaller" conflicts as poles assert their own interests for sure, but it's going to be around the baseline of conflicts that's consistently been simmering throughout history. The fear is increasing large-scale conflict between poles/blocks - ending the cyclic gap between major wars among major powers - but that's what happens when declining hegemon pushes their interests to the exclusion of others too intensely for too long.
(Vad and Kujat in Germany, Milley in USA).
Who want's to fight? It doesn't seem to be the military.
I came across the book recently, and it argues that we won't be able to statistically tell if the world is in fact getting more peaceful for about a century. The incidence of war as well as the number of dead doesn't seem to have appreciably decreased on average for the past two centuries, on a worldwide scale. It's true that there hasn't been a war as destructive as World War I and II since then (although the Iran-Iraq war rivals those in terms of number of deaths divided by the population of the combatant nations), but there's no particular reason to conclude that wars that kill so many people won't happen again.
It was quite convincing and sobering to me.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Only-Dead-Persistence-War-Modern/dp/0...
No, not just the general public; the 'long peace' is a hotly contested idea amongst academic and professional circles too. And, it's arguably a rather large amount of hand-wavey bullshit trying to paint certain nation states in a particular light and narrowly define 'war', 'peace', and 'violence'.
tl;dr lefty academics disagree?
Not only the Russia-Ukraine war is threatening to spiral out, but also there has been a very bloody war in Ethiopia. We are not at WWII levels of warfare, obviously, but I wonder where we are compared to the '80s or the '50s
https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace https://www.un.org/en/un75/new-era-conflict-and-violence https://oneearthfuture.org/news/there-really-evidence-declin...
This premise is delusional. The Russian military may have degraded, but the war in Ukraine shows clearly that the only aspect of warfare that has significantly changed since WWII is the vastly increased efficiency in targeting weapons payloads. Which can be unwound at any moment when smart munitions run thin. The idea that today's conscripts are less willing to fight than those in 1940 is ludicrous. Neither wanted to fight and both were ignorant blobs / yobs.
The long peace has been sustained only by mutually assured destruction. That construct has not been slowly undermined by any determined wish for unity contrary to it on the part of the people living under the regimes which are yoked into that system. There is every indication that disrupting that system would lead to one party or another committing a nuclear holocaust, so therefore the balance of terror (including Putin's repression of Russians) must be preserved at all costs.
I tend to agree. Well, relative piece, as smaller wars are still constant feature.
It's an unfalsifiable premise because the performance of the military is compared against a nebulous "less capable than we thought it was" bar, which by all accounts was clearly, albeit in hindsight, an incorrect worldview where Russia was supposedly going to conquer all of NATO in Europe in 3 days: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a21344/us-...
Also applies to government, business, and academia.
Those that knew war, kept peace. But now, especially with gen-z, there is less alarm and awareness of war. All the tech and military advancement mean war would be even more horrific and cruel but also as you can see in ukraine the usage of drones and remore controlled artillery is reshaping war.
Keep in mind, the rules of war only apply to the loser. The wars most western people alive today are familiar with are fought in remote countries and between soldiers. If your homeland was threatened most of your people will support breaking every rule of war.
That's always been the case. People used to just murder or enslave the populations they conquered.
While you can get away with mass genocide and slavery internally, it has gotten far riskier to attempt such a thing against a neighboring state. It'll also destroy your status as a leader, when previously a violent conquest was often viewed as "glorious".
I don't understand. Murdering or enslaving the population of the conquered country is a lot cheaper as a way to maintain control of it. So the fact that it's a lot harder politically to do those things now, than it was in the past, greatly increases the cost of maintaining control of a country. As the article says.
Depends on what you need the country for.
Nazis crushed the Czechoslovak state and executed any guerrillas caught fighting them, but they didn't mess with ordinary Czech workers, who were needed to keep the factories running. Mistreating qualified workers would decrease total industrial output and harm the German war effort.
There's an alternative view is that there was a long war essentially from the beginning of WW1 to the collapse of communism [0]. The so-called long peace also included the Korean War, the Vietnam war, various Arab-Israeli conflicts. I've seen it stated that there were only in fact a few days of peace in the entire 20C: the very brief period between Japan's surrender in August 1945 to the start of conflict that gradually ramped to the Vietnam war, when an Anglo/French force supported by rearmed Japanese took on the Viet Minh[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shield_of_Achilles:_War,_P...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Vietnam_(1945–1946)
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/space-based-missile-defense...
While I don't advocate war and violence, I can't help think that such a hostile takeover of a poorly run country by another better run country can be perceived as creative destruction in capitalism. War is too costly now reassuringly, but the incentive of leaders to keep the country strong, economically as well as militarily, is much less. The fear of being wiped out by a neighbor may have kept leaders in check. Now that fear is gone, and nothing has replaced it yet. The optimist in me hopes that states abandon the pretense of being above markets. The fear we desire in those who run states, the fear that we hope will keep them in check, will be that of losing paying customers, their citizens, to other competitive jurisdictions.
Dictators tend to have shitty armies because they depend upon buying loyalty and/or setting up self-sabotaging hierarchies beneath them to stay on top. They are good enough to oppress their own populace just fine but tend to get their asses handed to them when they ill-advisedly attempt external use.
Ukraine however, will have the second best trained and seasoned military in the world with top NATO weaponry, and is building a national identity. It may be wringing corruption and ineffectual leadership from the civilian government, will have DEEP ties with elite western militaries from training relationships, and will prove themselves as a good investment for Western foreign aid.
Ukraine may or may not get all its territory back, but Russia has, strategically, utterly lost this war. THey wanted a buffer satellite state, and instead have the second most capable NATO military a couple hundred miles from their capital.
Also, I suspect that Belarus will flip to a similar relationship with the West in the next 10 years / when Putin dies. It will be surrounded by Ukraine and the Baltic states, and Lukashenko is already in a tenuous position.
Interesting read but the above point is moot. History features many selfish leaders letting their kingdom, fief, colony, what have you fall into exactly that state of affairs. And when they were occupied, as often as not, the leadership was left intact so long as the tribute did flow. This is true from the ancient world up to through the 20th century.
> This is why, I’d argue, you see the proliferation of failed states globally: in the past it would be actively profitable for non-failed states to take advantage of them
Sure, there may be more independently standing "failed states" but occupation by a "more competent" power was rarely a corrective. These largely just became failed vassals. The little bit of bureaucratic support imposed by the occupier usually had the effect of depriving locals of the experience of self development and coordination and thus deepening and prolonging the crises within.
> I should note I find this version of the argument, based on incentives and interests more compelling than Steven Pinker’s version of the argument based on changing cultural mores.
> The value of the oil and other resources would be less than the cost of maintaining control of the country.
The reasons that managing such a country would be too costly now vs in the past are almost purely cultural. Treating an occupied place like a colony has diplomatic and internal consequences for the occupier (not enough in my opinion but much more than in the past). And much more importantly, the cultural inventions of nationalism and total insurgent warfare have made it much harder to maintain an occupation. Yes, there were insurgencies in the past but the cultural expectation that hundreds of thousands or even millions of people will live in craters, subsist on worms and rats, forgoe medicine, endure exposure, hunger, pain and trauma for years or decades or even generations to guarantee self rule.
The cultural invention of nationalistic mass resistance depends on technological innovations. You need modern small arms and explosives to make every cell of 20 or so fighters a threat which can't be ignored by an occupier. You need modern communication to coordinate these cells.
And of course the value of this cultural invention is in its ubiquity. So you need an era of sentimental propaganda that depends on modern mass media to disseminate it.
Ultimately technology and culture are not separate things. They shape each other as they develop and sometimes they are one in the same.
I wondered about that. For the record, I have zero evidence of this as reliable records are hard to find in that arena. Chechnya was Russia's bigger conflict and now, unlike Syria and few other spots, Russia's approach resembled anti-terrorist stance ( pop in for a quick action and hold a small group keeping tabs on things ).
The societies that seem to have a handle on this are ones that currently do not have peace ( say Ukraine or Israel, where both deal with an enemy threat on a regular basis ).
"Instead, the new incentive for most countries would be to build a military in a way that aims to minimize the political costs, rather than maximize combat power or even ‘security'."
I am willing to agree on this one. There is a clear weariness in US for giving military even more money. I am seeing something similar in the old country and that is despite Russian aggression aimed at Ukraine.
"Meanwhile, maximizing the army for repression means developing paramilitary internal police forces at scale (Rosgvardiya is an obvious example), which direct resources away from core conventional military; such security-oriented forces aren’t designed for a conventional war and perform poorly at it."
The argument seems valid, but I am not entirely convinced. Secret police is not new to Russia and if any country has their apparatus working, it likely is Russia. If that is the case, it makes it difficult for me to believe that they do not have a working system that recognizes and gives some leeway, like any wars before that, to people doing the actual fighting ( like.. you don't put a front soldier in Gulag just because he openly says Putin is a dick ). That said, the argument does provide an explanation for Russia's failure. I am just not sure I agree though.
"revanchist powers (Israel, Taiwan, Poland, Finland, Ukraine, etc.)"
I found the listing of Poland and Finland interesting, but I am not sure what argument for keeping them on that list is.
" Of course the big unanswered and at the moment unanswerable question is where countries like India or the People’s Republic of China fit."
I am not sure it is unanswerable. Some people have definitely taken a stab at it. Right now, the momentum seems to be generating a new axis with both India and China rising as new powers and flexing their individual muscles ( we hear a lot about China, but that seems like it is mostly, because it is US's current main concern ).
India also has major corruption problems that bode ill for it in future conflicts. China is a bit harder to read, sometimes it seems like the party is clamping down on it, but there is always the low level stories of how to deal with a system that is corrupt from top to bottom.
Makes sense as the video was about the Russians sending multiple waves of tanks into a kill zone with no change of tactics and getting completely wiped out every time.
- Soviet Union: per definition, at least for ideological reasons
- Post-Soviet Union: Yeltsin, the rise of the oligarchs
And historically the Russian/Soviet army has always underperformed for its size, their notable successes have generally been due to being able to crush their opponent in sheer mass of conscripted bodies. Cases where having a lot of people don't help, like ships and aircraft, often end in embarrassing defeats against far smaller foes. A good case study here is the Battle of Tsushima.
I’ll reiterate. You described it as something that Putin caused (in part).
> The one that is backed by historical evidence: widespread corruption rotted the organization from the core. Putin is running his country like the world's largest petro-Mafia, with poor internal controls that allowed for a widespread looting of the state's assets.
But it has always been like that. At least since it was born from the Soviet Union.
But now you change your tune to to it being corrupt “relative to democracies”.
Putin may have inherited a corrupt system, but he certainly didn't do anything to rectify the problem and most likely made it worse.
He is actually very lucky that the world has been relatively peaceful during his reign, it appears an ambitious Japan could have bitten off a chunk of Russia if they wanted to and his military would have been at a disadvantage trying to stop them. Putin also got very lucky that the rest of the world didn't get involved in the invasion of Crimea, but that seems to have made him cocky and now he's tipped his hand and blown his bluff.
Is there really? There’s some grumbling online, and the recent debt ceiling fight did involve a cap on spending. But they still increased spending, and it’s entirely possible and probable that cap is going to get uncapped in a supplemental, as Republican and Democrats in the Senate are still quite into spending on this.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/mcconnell-says-mil...
The US populace may get grumbly about spending on Ukraine, although realistically most people are just bored and have tuned out that news. But I think there’s about a 0% chance we won’t still increase military spending, especially given even more posturing and escalation about Taiwan.
<< The US populace may get grumbly about spending on Ukraine, although realistically most people are just bored and have tuned out that news.
I chuckled, because I kinda see that. That said, that boredom will evaporate rather fast when that bored person is asked to pay even more, while given little to no support. And that ask is coming eventually.
US has been running on borrowed time for a while now. It managed to go into serious debt over Afghanistan and Iraq and still pretended it does not actually need to pay for it in terms of taxes. FED also obliged by keeping rates super low to keep the interest payments a non-issue. That is ending based on current trajectory.
As for tuning out, I think you are really onto something. I went out of my way to limit the amount of news I process.
We basically have a caste system for the military, so outside certain geographic regions and economic classes, military stuff happens [gestures vaguely] over there. People will posture about it, but nah, nobody will actually cut spending, as the military-industrial complex is everywhere, and “cutting military spending” actually becomes “we can’t shut down that base or stop making that engine part, because jobs”.
What will actually happen is superficial cuts to programs that don’t contribute meaningfully to the debt, but are nice culture war targets. Past that, we’ll engage in some gross race and class cuts to Medicaid. But we are not going to cut military spending, because, again, it’s a jobs program that’s protected by a vague sense of patriotic duty.
The focus of the post is two-fold: the recent outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, in truncated form (the war has been going on at a low level since 2014, with militia forces supplied by Russia and Ukraine fighting one another in eastern Ukraine throughout that period), and a recommendation for a book about a naval battle in World War II. Hmm... what about Vietnam and Iraq?
This is pretty standard American exceptionalist propaganda-speak, as seen in corporate media and Hollywood: lots of material on WWII, and on today's conflict. It's obvious why neither Vietnam nor Iraq/Afghanistan are mentioned in the post, those being the largest post-war conflicts the US was involved in. The Vietnam War was in many ways the result of European colonial powers (France) to hold onto their colonial possessions post-WWII; the US could have supported Vietnam independence in 1945 but chose to allow France to try to seize control again, and then took over from the French under JFK's tenure, and spent about a decade killing Vietnamese people in a futile effort to keep the puppet South Vietnam government in power. There was also an element of Cold War proxy fight.
The Iraq War is even less defensible; the WMD claims were deliberate lies concocted by the CIA on the orders of the Bush Administration and supported by the UK's Blair government. Basically a class A war crime. Similarly, the debacles in Afghanistan (NATO-backed), and Libya (NATO-backed) don't get any scrutiny.
As far as nuclear weapons, well, they haven't stopped war, just pushed the conflicts into various proxy wars, as seen in the India-Pakistan border region. The architects and profiteers of war don't want to get nuked themselves, though they are quite happy to send kids off to die in these conflicts, so nuclear weapons are somewhat stabilizing, barring some accident or other.
"the period since WWII which has had a low and indeed falling level of war, both inter-state and intra-state. Normally, when I say this is something that has happened, I find I encounter a great deal of incredulity among the general public. Surely they can list off any number of wars or other violent conflicts that happened recently. But the data here is actually quite strong (and we all know my attitude towards certainty on points of real uncertainty; this is not one of them) – violence has been falling worldwide for nearly 80 years, the fall has been dramatic and relatively consistent."
> standard American exceptionalist propaganda-speak
"the USA’s record as a neighbor to Central and South America is not one we ought generally to be proud of"
Also, the record of America's post-WWII wars actually supports his thesis. Except when brighter U.S. Presidents had a "rush in, accomplish very limited objectives, rush out" game plan - those minor wars have ~all proven too expensive to continue. ~Nothing actually gets conquered, and on a military-prowess-per-dollar basis, the American armed forces come out looking pretty underwhelming.
That is not the focus of the post. It's a "Fireside Friday;" an abbreviated [1] discussion of some topic, combined with a generally unrelated list of recommendations. You're misreading a lot into the author to assume that there's some hidden agenda to avoid talking about America's modern wars. There's no discussion of the US here because the entire theory is essentially a pondering (not structured enough to be a full thesis) of "does long peace make countries into paper tigers?" where the US not having been at peace means it fails the precondition.
And as other commenters have noted, the author does have include criticism of America's foreign policy misadventures in this blog post, not to mention that there's been more forceful denunciations in other blog posts.
[1] Abbreviated here is relative; the author's in-depth discussions will be multiple blog posts on a single topic.
In many aspects, they were peer competitors on the battlefield. The "paper tiger" argument would have made more sense had Russia unsuccessfully invaded Kiev in 2014. But a lot can change in 8 years.
Yes, Russia has had the advantage in long-range strike capability, but they chose not to strike command centers early in the war (contrast with the surprise airstrike on Saddam Hussein's palace 20 years ago, which kicked off Washington's unprovoked invasion).
Utter BS, both in terms of raw numbers and contextually -- in "eliding" the fact that they were invaded by a certain neighboring country in 2014.
As you are perfectly aware. Please stop posting nonsense like this.
Were you not aware of this? It was kept quiet, but not exactly secret.
> Since Crimea was annexed in 2014, the U.S. and partner militaries have helped grow Ukraine’s forces from just over 100,000 troops to nearly 250,000 [in 2017]. Just since January, Capt. Christopher’s unit of 250 soldiers has added another 3,000 or so Ukrainian soldiers to Kiev’s ranks.
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2017/10/ukraine-us-trains...
By invoking the number "10", subtracted from 2022 -- you're making an allusion to Russia's claims that it was significantly threatened by Ukraine's buildup or NATO musings pre-2014 to do, well -- what it just had to do to protect itself.
How is +150% over 3 years "imagined"?
When it alludes to the pre-2014 situation -- as your post does.