The Grand Illusion II
The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities
21–30 of 339 posts
Re: The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities
#22> Experience needs to be retained and institutionalized. Capable leaders need to be promoted and incapable but politically influential leaders sidelined. Also applies to government, business, and academia.
But those organizations can have fitness pressure applied to them outside the context of hot wars. People love to make a big deal of the "fund N losers to find 1 winner" aspect of VC.
Re: The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities
#23"We have all noticed that the Russian military appears far less capable than we thought it was; frankly it seems incapable of even some of the very basic tasks of modern industrial armies engaged in conventional military operations." 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 fe…
IMHO he is overlooking the most obvious answer to why the Russian military is performing poorly. 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. So when it is time for the institutions to do their job the…
He mentioned that allowing corruption in a military is a way of preventing military-driven internal coups.
Re: The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities
#24This blog post has some curious blind spots that, if taken into account, negate most of its primary thesis about 'the long peace'.
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.
Re: The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities
#25A lot of cogent analysis here, but I’m surprised the author doesn’t seem to know about the economic and political forms of warfare which the US has been pursuing as a cheaper alternative to conventional war. 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…
So, not to come off as "these are good things" or anything, but you have to be able to see that "economic warfare" is preferable to "warfare warfare", right? It would obviously be better to have neither, but if I have to pick one, I know which one I'm going to pick, and I don't think it's unreasonable to characterize a switch from traditional warfare to economic warfare as "more peaceful" or even just "peaceful".
Re: The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities
#26"We have all noticed that the Russian military appears far less capable than we thought it was; frankly it seems incapable of even some of the very basic tasks of modern industrial armies engaged in conventional military operations." 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 fe…
IMHO he is overlooking the most obvious answer to why the Russian military is performing poorly. 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. So when it is time for the institutions to do their job the…
I was watching one of the many videos on the Ukraine war the other day and they were postulating that the different groups were competing for war spoils so both don’t cooperate and actively try to get one of the other groups to weaken the defenses enough (while being destroyed) so they can just roll in and claim whatever is being fought over like a coal mine.
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.
Re: The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities
#27"We have all noticed that the Russian military appears far less capable than we thought it was; frankly it seems incapable of even some of the very basic tasks of modern industrial armies engaged in conventional military operations." 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 fe…
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. 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…
You raise a valid point. There does seem to be an - not completely unexpected - disconnect between average US denizen and established powers ( in this case, an ancient senator ).
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.
Re: The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities
#28"We have all noticed that the Russian military appears far less capable than we thought it was; frankly it seems incapable of even some of the very basic tasks of modern industrial armies engaged in conventional military operations." 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 fe…
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. 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…
Even on the right there are arguments against military funding boondoggles. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/boondoggles-where-did...
Re: The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities
#29A lot of cogent analysis here, but I’m surprised the author doesn’t seem to know about the economic and political forms of warfare which the US has been pursuing as a cheaper alternative to conventional war. 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…
Agreed. Most modern forms of Western warfare are non-violent with occasional violent repercussions. It's not lining up troops and sending them places in uniforms, although that does happen.
It's economic, cyber, covert, cultural and other less noticeable sieges that cause collapse from the inside.
Re: The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities
#30> I’ve discussed this before a few times, but I think Azar Gat is probably right to suggest that the long peace is itself a consequence of the changing incentives created by the industrial revolution and to an even greater extent, by nuclear weapons. Prior to the industrial revolution, war was the best way to get rich (if you won) because land and conquered subjects were so much more valuable than any kind of capital investment (infrastructure, manufacture, tools, etc.) that could have been developed with the same resources. The industrial revolution changes this, both by making war a lot more destructive (thus lowering returns to successful warfare)1 while at the same time massively raising returns to capital investment in things like infrastructure, factories and tractors. It suddenly made more sense, if you coveted your neighbors resources, to build more factories and buy those resources than to try to seize them by force. Nuclear weapons in turn took this same effect and ratcheted it up even further, by effectively making the cost of total war infinite.
I’m getting such Beltway Think Tank vibes for some reason.