The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by epicureanideal » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 6:35 PM UTC

bradrn wrote: post #17

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of possible reasons: 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_Vi…

Deveraux explicitly endorses (1) in the article: > 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.

[flagged]

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

#112

Post by l33t233372 » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 6:36 PM UTC

avgcorrection wrote: post #101

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a cop-out: there are fundamental qualitative differences between a near-pear conflict, which demands restructuring of a nation's economic activity around supporting the fight, versus the kinds of conflicts the US was involved in post-WWII, where the costs aren't that much different than the steady-state maintenance of our armed forces.

It’s certainly a cop-out if you use such a segmentation to argue that things are peaceful.

Peaceful just has to be a continuum in order for us to make any sense of a theory of peace.

Certainly wars between great powers and much smaller countries are more peaceful than near-peer wars.

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

#113

Post by WeylandYutani » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 6:39 PM UTC

13of40 wrote: post #89

michaelt wrote: post #64

> What is – quietly, because they haven’t tried to launch a major invasion recently – most militaries are probably similarly incapable of the basic tasks of industrial warfare? 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 d…

Remember how the US went into Afghanistan with HMMWVs (aluminum bodied cars with canvas doors) and M16a2s (full length battle rifles with iron sights) and left with MRAPs and A4s. You learn stuff when you switch from training to combat.

America didn't learn it forgot. Many people wrote about counter insurgency warfare in the 70s after Vietnam.

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.

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

#114

Post by Benjammer » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 6:40 PM UTC

epicureanideal wrote: post #111

bradrn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deveraux explicitly endorses (1) in the article: > 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.

[flagged]

"If you would just do what I told you, you wouldn't get hit!"

Big yikes here...

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

#115

Post by l33t233372 » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 6:41 PM UTC

newuser94303 wrote: post #105

marianatom wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here's the thing, humanity got lucky. there was a nonzero chance that china and the dictatorships could have triumphed. if China didn't botch the chance to overtake US in 2008 with a capable dictator. if China got its hands on many advanced US military technologies. if Russia didn't botch the Ukraine invasion. if covid didn't have a vaccine, except one that China developed. I'm sure most of us are aware of the gulags…

I don't think that China has any interest in conquering the rest of World. They just want to be rich. They are stealing IP and spying. The fact that the US needs to use military force is a failure of policy. 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 econo…

> The fact that the US needs to use military force is a failure of policy.

And a million realists(in the technical sense that IR people use the word) cried out in terror at once.

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

#116

Post by pdonis » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 6:42 PM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #63

I'm surprised to hear the author state that war is more destructive than in the past. Is that actually true? Certainly we are more capable of destruction than in the past, but modern millitaries have put a lot of effort into being less broadly destructive, unless they specifically intend to broadly destroy things. Photos of bombed-out cities in Syria are jarring, but even the worst devastation there doesn't look as b…

> Certainly we are more capable of destruction than in the past

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).

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

#117

Post by ajuc » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 6:42 PM UTC

FpUser wrote: post #84

selimthegrim wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After WWII Ukraine and Belarus were given separate UN seats from USSR. So in 1991 they just kept those seats.

For fuck's sake. The point was that at the time Ukraine was part of USSR and by attacking Ukraine Hitler has attacked USSR with all the consequences. It seems that you are trying to do something different here but I'll leave you to it.

I didn't think I'd it necessary to mention that Ukraine was a part of USSR and Poland at the time. It's common knowledge. What isn't common knowledge is that Hitler had plans for Ukraine in particular (inspired by Hlodomor).

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

#118

Post by pdonis » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 6:45 PM UTC

nitwit005 wrote: post #107

> because it no longer makes economic sense to do so. The value of the oil and other resources would be less than the cost of maintaining control of the country 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 dest…

> That's always been the case. People used to just murder or enslave the populations they conquered.

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.

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

#119

Post by avgcorrection » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 6:45 PM UTC

noduerme wrote: post #102

avgcorrection wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. But Libya was not in jest.

Libya was unfortunately in earnest, but for exactly the right reasons. 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…

> [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"]

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.)

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

#120

Post by pdonis » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 6:46 PM UTC

akkartik wrote: post #55

My only quibble with this article: it fails to apply its own conclusions to the US. The balance of evidence (Pentagon procurement processes and cost overruns of major projects) shows the US military too has a significant paper component.

Where does the article claim this is not the case?