291–300 of 339 posts
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…
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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.
The military took many lessons from Vietnam that didn't work in the Middle East. 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 wel…
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.
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I mean the operative word in "Cold War" is Cold. There was a lot of arms buildup and posturing, and some proxy wars in smaller or less developed countries, but no wars waged directly between the great powers. The Cold War was part of the long peace that HST predicted. I think you could argue that America's supremacy was never seriously contested by the USSR - sure the USSR had nukes, but the US had plenty of those as…
So Vietnam just doesn't count? It wasn't a small way by any metric that matters - it just happened to not be on the home soil of the us or ussr.
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In what way? The fundamental argument is that war is less profitable than economic competition, which is exactly how the Cold War progressed, and why the US won . 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.
> The fundamental argument is that war is less profitable than economic competition, which is exactly how the Cold War progressed, and why the US won. So for countries that lose the economic competition, might war be a 'better' option?
The long post-war era of peace is due to a number of factors, but the one we don't talk about enough is that the U.S. spent untold trillions of dollars becoming a global police force. This may be the biggest factor. I believe it is certainly the prerequisite for any others to have had an effect. 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 spendi…
Peace in Europe maybe but there were plenty of wars going on in the rest of the world post WWII.
The long peace doesn't refer to a period without wars. Just to a period with much fewer wars.
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…
Russia has had a similar strategy with other places since they started doing military campaigns 2008.
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 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.
> 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…
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>Lol. No. Explain the military purpose of sending riot police OMON are not just riot police and are routinely sent on Russian military expeditions (e.g. there are some in Syria). Theres some evidence that a few hundred of the invading force of 15,000 (cite: Wikipedia) were OMON. The question you apparently haven't asked yourself is "if their goal was occupation, why did they send a few hundred OMON troops rather than…
They didn't send a few hundred. They sent 60 thousand. Putin has been very consistent about his views of Ukraine. It makes perfect sense that he got it completely wrong. As I said, read the reports, you may find it interesting.
In no way, shape or form does that justify presuming that this was an occupation force - with or without uniforms.