The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities

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.

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:

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"“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]

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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.

[1]https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf

> 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.