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

Its not the main point of the article, but it made me wonder if finance is the new way “war” (predatory struggle for ownership & control) is waged in today’s world

"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 few other spots, Russia's approach resembled anti-terrorist stance ( pop in for a quick action and hold a small group keeping tabs on things ).

The societies that seem to have a handle on this are ones that currently do not have peace ( say Ukraine or Israel, where both deal with an enemy threat on a regular basis ).

"Instead, the new incentive for most countries would be to build a military in a way that aims to minimize the political costs, rather than maximize combat power or even ‘security'."

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.

"Meanwhile, maximizing the army for repression means developing paramilitary internal police forces at scale (Rosgvardiya is an obvious example), which direct resources away from core conventional military; such security-oriented forces aren’t designed for a conventional war and perform poorly at it."

The argument seems valid, but I am not entirely convinced. Secret police is not new to Russia and if any country has their apparatus working, it likely is Russia. If that is the case, it makes it difficult for me to believe that they do not have a working system that recognizes and gives some leeway, like any wars before that, to people doing the actual fighting ( like.. you don't put a front soldier in Gulag just because he openly says Putin is a dick ). That said, the argument does provide an explanation for Russia's failure. I am just not sure I agree though.

"revanchist powers (Israel, Taiwan, Poland, Finland, Ukraine, etc.)"

I found the listing of Poland and Finland interesting, but I am not sure what argument for keeping them on that list is.

" Of course the big unanswered and at the moment unanswerable question is where countries like India or the People’s Republic of China fit."

I am not sure it is unanswerable. Some people have definitely taken a stab at it. Right now, the momentum seems to be generating a new axis with both India and China rising as new powers and flexing their individual muscles ( we hear a lot about China, but that seems like it is mostly, because it is US's current main concern ).

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 periods throughout history that were relatively peaceful because an exceptionally strong nation state decided to step up and enforce a peace. Considering that the US was half of global GDP at the end of WW2 and has long been more than happy to sanction anyone who conducts in an (unapproved) war (such as Russia right now), the modern era of "long peace" fits this theory pretty well.

You may find the book Softwar by Jason Lowery of interest.

A 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 punish the people and weaken the government.

Moreover there was a US supported coup attempt in 2002 and one basically cooked up entirely by the US in 2020 (Operation Gideon). This was a plan to actually invade the country by boat with a small force to try to take control of the government.

This is part of a pattern of behavior for the US in the 20th century. The book Washington Bullets does a good job cataloguing the various interventions of this form.