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

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

#121

Post by avgcorrection »

l33t233372 wrote: post #112
avgcorrection wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

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

#122

Post by Animats »

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]

No, it's mostly Putin. He wants to be Tsar of All the Russias, like Peter the Great, whom he greatly admires.

‘All his (Putin's) ideas... come from the past. He wants to move the country to the 19th century, to a time when empires were possible.’ — Marat Gelman, former Putin adviser.[1]

[1] https://archive.is/ddazo

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

#123

Post by epicureanideal »

Benjammer wrote: post #114
epicureanideal wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

That's not at all what I said.

What do you think about the video I linked?

Also, analogies to dysfunctional interpersonal relationships don't represent the dynamics of many-party international competition very well.

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

#124

Post by krunck »

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.

It's what the US has been doing since WWII.

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

#125

Post by nitwit005 »

pdonis wrote: post #118
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.

What's changed isn't the economics, it's what other leaders will do if you attempt it.

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

#126

Post by Merad »

I thought I recognized the site. This the same author who wrote very detailed analysis of the Siege of Gondor and the Battle of Helms Deep from LOTR as well as articles about military and political topics from Game of Thrones, and many real-world historical topics. They're a military historian IRL and have a lot of content worth reading: https://acoup.blog/resources-for-world-builders/

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

#127

Post by rossdavidh »

newuser94303 wrote: post #41

I think that Globalization has increased the costs of war. You don't want to attack your suppliers. I also think that China is probably a paper tiger on offense but they are trying not to look like an easy target on defense. Most of their recent battles have been fist fights in the Himalayas. Deglobalization is an attempt to make war feasible because some strong countries feel like they are losing economic war and wa…

France and Germany had a lot of trade in 1913. Russia and Ukraine had a lot of trade in 2013. Every civil war ever fought, was between sides that did a lot of "trade". The Opium War (no small conflict) was fought over trade policy. The U.S.A. and Canada/UK did a lot of trade prior to the War of 1812. Napoleon's invasion of Russia was done despite the fact that the two sides had a lot of trade. Trade has never been a very reliable deterrent to war.

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.

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

#128

Post by throwaway6734 »

marianatom wrote: post #67
newuser94303 wrote: post #41

I think that Globalization has increased the costs of war. You don't want to attack your suppliers. I also think that China is probably a paper tiger on offense but they are trying not to look like an easy target on defense. Most of their recent battles have been fist fights in the Himalayas. Deglobalization is an attempt to make war feasible because some strong countries feel like they are losing economic war and wa…

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…

It's not just luck though. The American system is better than both the Chinese and Russian ones.

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

#129

Post by pdonis »

nitwit005 wrote: post #125
pdonis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What's changed isn't the economics, it's what other leaders will do if you attempt it.

I would say both have changed. The economics has changed because, even leaving out political factors, the benefit of invading a country has greatly decreased, because the kind of war you need to wage to invade a country now will destroy whatever wealth in that country you were hoping to gain by invading it. And the political factors have changed because previous ways of trying to reduce the cost of controlling a country will now trigger consequences (in the form of actions by other countries) that they didn't before.

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

#130

Post by barbariangrunge »

safety1st wrote: post #6

This stuff about the world being peaceful due to the industrial revolution doesn't make a lot of sense to me. For one thing, the IR significantly predated WW1 and WW2. It didn't prevent those, so how'd it cause the "long peace" afterwards? The predominant theory about this in international relations is hegemonic stability theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemonic_stability_theory - there have been several peri…

The peace is due to nuclear weapons and the threat of global extinction. When that isn’t a factor, we still see lots of wars. Period. Because the next major war between nuclear equipped powers might be the worlds last
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