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 display in every helmet and a grenade-dropping drone in every backpack.

One officer wants to train loads of soldiers as linguists, so they can win hearts and minds in any country they might occupy.

One officer wants to focus on PR at home, as maintaining a steady supply of cash and adventurous young men is key to winning any conflict.

One officer wants to cut bureaucracy and red tape, as every individual in a support function is someone not in a front-line function, and it's front line fighters that win battles.

One officer thinks the important thing is physical conditioning and classic soldiering - Marching, marksmanship, long hikes carrying heavy backpacks.

How do you decide who to promote, if it's 30 years since you were last at war and none of them has ever won a real battle?

"Instead, the new incentive for most countries would be to build a military in a way that aims to minimize the political costs... it makes sense not to build an army for conventional operations but instead with an eye towards the kinds of actions which mitigate the harm caused by failed states: armies aimed at policing actions or humanitarian operations."

MRAPs exist to minimize the political costs (dead and wounded soldiers) in a policing action. When you look at conventional wars like Ukraine, HMMWVs remain very relevant in their doctrinal role.

The combat part was ok I guess, but what OP is pointing out was what we went to conflict with. Lots of money was spent upgrading Humvees with armor and turret mounts that didn't exist. The equipment fielded by US troops actually looked very different from a comparison of 2001 and 2005. Body armor went through development iterations, camouflage patterns, infantry equipment like magazine carriers and weapons optics, and so on.

Had the US tried to drive into the Afghan and Iraqi desert the way we did against fighters armed with heavier weapons and fighting skills then the US losses would have been a lot higher.

The Iraqi military had more formidable equipment but was so ill-trained and the moral so low that it was very much a paper tiger.

I think people underestimate hiw much the US military has transformed over the two two-decade long conflicts. There have been striking changes both organizationally, culturally, and technologically.

I’m not a military and/or Iraq war expert so I don’t want to argue definitively, but I don’t think you can say US losses would have been significantly higher had the Iraqi army had heavier weapons and fighting skills — they’d have needed effective air defense, too.

I think the Ru-UKR war shows the vulnerability of contemporary air forces to air defense, however, and that Western/NATO forces themselves lack cost-effective short-range and medium-range air defense systems. The US Air Force fields exquisite weapons (“platforms”) and these may prove useless in a conflict like Ru-UKR. Or, perhaps, they’re good enough to overcome the difficulties that the Sukhoi/MiG-based air forces of either side have encountered. Hard to know.

Range and mobility in artillery systems also seems like a weak point for the US military. The Excalibur precision shell is very expensive but likely cost effective—one shot, one kill. But the US M777 towed howitzer costs ~$3.7M (titanium) while the French Caesar costs $5-6M and can outrange the M777 in addition to driving away immediately after firing.

Afghanistan may have been a different story.

The US has the M109 which can serve in some of the same roles the Caesar can.

Also, does France have much rocket artillery? That might play a factor in the requirements for other artillery systems.

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.

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 well.

The problem with that doctrine in Afghanistan is that hiding even two men is difficult in arid environments. A team is far more likely to be seen regardless of its size and needs to be able to defend itself if compromised, which happens far more often in a desert. By 2010 the SOP was 8-man teams. At least one bloody incident was the cause of those numbers being bumped up.

There's a saying that rings true, "The military is always fighting the last war".

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.

Same. That's where I heard it.

> The Taliban were able to do this with ease.

The Taliban weren't doing what we were doing. They generally did not, to my knowledge, go out and sit in an OP on a rocky hillside for 3-5 days straight, where any random goat herder might happen to decide to graze his herd one afternoon. Their MO was to set up an ambush that would be executed the same day and that was not likely to be discovered by a passing American, since Americans weren't wandering randomly through the hills at all times.

Changing organizational processes tends to be extremely hard in large orgs, and I wonder how the military deals with it.

It's worth noting that this was one of many incremental changes. When I started that deployment in 2009, snipers were going out in 5-man teams. The team that got hit actually did technically consist of 8 men (as was already the SOP), but they were split into two four-man elements that took different positions about a kilometer apart. The mandate going forward was that all 8 team members had to be within earshot of each other at all times. It was the latest of many orders in the trend of ratcheting up firepower at the cost of concealability.

The incident you're talking about happened much earlier, in Iraq. I believe this article is referencing it: https://www.dvidshub.net/news/6921/former-magnificent-bastar...

It doesn't say they fell asleep, because of course there's no way to know that. It's an assumption that has been repeated as fact, though it does seem likely.

Barrel length is important to velocity up to a point, but you can also tune other parts of the system to increase velocity out of shorter barrels (M855A1). However, that is far from the only consideration when discussing the ballistics of a cartridge. Projectile mass determines how stable the projectile is. The 5.56 projectile tumbles and cavitates when hitting soft tissue due to its low mass. However, that also means obstructions like foliage can cause it to destabilize in-flight and it is less effective at barrier penetration.

Well they did have unbeatable prices on this red taint from a producer in… Germany. Yup. Some people are actually good at war.

It’s about misunderstanding new technology notably machine guns or to be even more correct a military career structure and organisation which prevented people who understood new technologies and try to shake the boat to rise in ranks while putting conservative officers in control of the army.

It isn't as if there was no war for a generation. The Russo-Japanese war in 1904-5 was precisely the kind of brutal industrial conflict that foreshadowed the horrors of WWI almost to a T.

But Western powers were mostly unwilling to learn from such a distant war, and lessons learnt by junior officers who observed the carnage closely weren't taken seriously enough.

In this specific case humvees were particularly ineffective against the IED-based warfare being conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan. Light, fast, vehicles are not particularly resilient to explosives.

Also, while the 20” battle rifle does provide superior ballistics for the 5.56 round, it’s unwieldy and there was a fair bit of CQB during the GWOT. 14.5” carbines were a sort of middle ground that could perform in both long range and short range engagements. Night time direct action raids by special forces even opt for shorter 10.5/11.5 barrels.

I recommend Jeff Gurwitch on YouTube he goes in depth into the history and rational behind equipment evolutions during the GWOT from a first hand perspective as an ex-SF soldier.

M4: a short barrel is easier to use in close quarters fighting, and this outweighs the loss of accuracy at longer distances.

I would argue even more drastically that, a commander or doctrine is only as good as the war they are in. I mean that every conflict has the capacity of developing so differently that even a tested commander or strategy is suspect. Historically, conflict during a period was more homogenous. Having a war every 5 to 10 years would keep your officer corps relatively relevant. Only in large empires with a huge variety of martial interests would we see commanders succeed wildly in one engagement and utterly fail in another.

But modern wars swing suddenly from guerilla, to conventional, to insurgent, to cold with such rapidity that command experience is profoundly difficult to rely on as a predictor of success.

Probably the wisest way to promote in a modern military is to use all your standard expectations in peacetime. Who is organized, dutiful, etc. But maintain the knowledge that once shit hits the fan, you will be moving people around based largely on success. Which is what happens in real full blown conflicts. France in WWI is a good example.

The much harder question is how do you measure performance in non-conventional wars?

The US Navy did extensive wargaming at the Naval War College in the inter-war years, from after WW1 to about 1933. The results were extraordinarily valuable in the Pacific when WW2 came about. The strategic issues the Japanese had can be seen as the consequence of not gaming full campaigns (as opposed to putative "decisive battles").

Fascinating free book that motivated these comments:

https://www.history.navy.mil/research/publications/publicati...

"Between 1919 and 1941, the U.S. Navy transformed itself from a powerful if unsophisticated force into the fleet that won a two-ocean war. The great puzzle of U.S. naval history is how that was accomplished. This book argues that war gaming at the U.S. Naval War College made an enormous, and perhaps decisive, contribution."

A whole string of vital lessons were learned during the gaming, which I can go into if you like (or you can read the book.)

Most importantly, the game in 1933 showed that the "through ticket to Manila" version of War Plan Orange would not work. The capital ships would arrive there with underwater damage and no way to repair it. They'd have to go back to Pearl Harbor, or the west coast, to reach facilities that would allow repairs. In which case, what was the point?

After that part, US war plans in the Pacific involved island hopping, so forward bases could be obtained where repairs could be performed. This had a number of important downstream implications: amphibious assault against protected islands would be necessary, with the equipment, training, and doctrine that implies (these would go on to be applied in the various invasions in Europe, including D-Day). Mobile dry docks would be needed (the US led the world in these in WW2, including modular ones that could be hooked together to produce something that could service a battleship.)

The need to fight across the Pacific implied ships would be up against land based planes in the Mandates (various island groups assigned to Japan after WW1). This meant carrier planes had to be on par with land based planes. The British did not learn this lesson and started the war with greatly inferior carrier planes (some of which were biplanes!)

The games illustrated that carrier operations needed to be optimized for rapid recovery of planes. The more rapidly planes could be recovered, the more planes a carrier could launch (and then recover before they ran out of fuel.) Capt. Reeves went on to command USS Ranger, where he pushed strongly to accelerate flight operations, eventually developing the system of landing planes before a wire crash barrier, then pushing them forward of the barrier to rest on the deck as more planes landed. This avoided the need to cycle the elevator(s) during landing operations. The US Navy was the only navy doing this at the start of the war. Fueling and reloading, even storing, aircraft on the flight deck was a natural extension of this. As a result, US carriers could carry more aircraft than those of other navies; they were not constrained by the size of the hangar.

The games showed that carriers were vulnerable to damage to their flight decks from even small bombs, and that there would be great value in the context of a campaign if this damage could be repaired by the ship's crew. This led the US to designs where the flight deck was unarmored, made of wood on a steel framework. USS Enterprise could not have participated in many of the carrier battles of the war (and the US would have lacked any carrier at the final climactic battle off Guadalcanal) had this not been the case. The British, in comparison, had armored flight decks, which meant after any damage to them they needed to go to a repair facility.

The circular formation used in carrier task groups in the war was developed in the games.

The games showed there would be great attrition of aircraft and aircrews. This meant the fleet had to be backed up by a very large pilot training program, as it was. The Japanese never understood this implication (at least, until it was too late) and failed to implement a scalable pilot training program, nor adequate pilot recovery efforts, and suffered from catastrophic decline in effectiveness as their first team pilots were lost.

The games showed the importance of scouting. Various ways of doing this were tried, eventually leading to investment in flying boats (which also were imagined as bombers, although they were overshadowed in that respect.)

(Of course, perhaps the most famous unlearned lesson from the Fleet Problems was the vulnerability of Pearl Harbor... the Navy simulated a surprise carrier attack on Pearl Harbor two or three times, each time it was wildly successful, and still the defenses weren't beefed up before December 7).

Some of the lessons learned in the table games about carriers were before the Fleet Problems could have learned the same lessons, due to the carriers not yet being available. Indeed, one of the issues the games were addressing was just what kind of carriers should be built. I expect any solution the NWC games came up with that could be verified in the FPs would have been. Also, the fleet problems would have provided vital inputs to the enhance the rules the NWC games used.

Other unlearned lessons (from NWC): the importance of unrestricted submarine warfare (this had been ruled out in the games because the British were assumed to be neutral, so not targeting their ships strongly constrained what the subs could do), the importance of night battles (the USN failed to train adequately for these and suffered greatly in the Solomons for it), kamikazes (the games assumed the Japanese would have an adequate pilot training pipeline and not have to resort to this), and what would be necessary to get Japan to surrender (politics in Japan was out of scope.)

Although you can kinda benchmark, i.e training exercises, that allow you to test people physically and technically, but it's a really poor analogy, because it's not feasible to test people emotionally and mentally to the stresses of a real life scenario without having a real life scenario - its possible to simulate, but not ethical, it would be far too dangerous to the individual and the people running the scenario.

As I understand it (or surmise), the trick is that the drone operator sees your squad and its surroundings. So he can give you a shout, “Yo! People in the bushes forward to your left, eighty metres!”. You as the squad commander aren't doing the filtering on that channel, it's self-prioritizing.

> And if you are unlucky and blessed with the right kind of leadership some staff officer in some remote hq will start to micromanagement you.

Hmmyeah, sounds familiar... Aliens, with the Lt. back in the ship[1] directing his Space Marines and Ripley, right?

___

[1]: Or was he in the ground vehicle, that long low truck(ish) thingy with the ridiculously non-existent ground clearance? Been too long and I'm too old, can't remember.

Each of these commanders may be better suited to a different conflict. The commander who is competent in one conflict may be a buffoon in a different conflict.

Even winning battles doesn't necessarily set up a commander for success. If your enemy changes between conflicts (say, going from a near-peer adversary to an insurgent adversary, a-la-Gulf War 1 -> Gulf War 2, or insurgency to near-peer, a-la Russia-in-Chechnya to Russia-in-Ukraine), radically different strategy, operations, and tactics are required.

I think this goes a long way to explaining the old saying "everyone prepares to win the last war." It boils down to "this guy did good last time, he'll do good this time too" when what helped him the last time is a very specific way of thinking that is not applicable now.

TL;DR: Responding to Change over Following a Plan

I think that's correct. And I have 2 examples, one that proves it, and one that disproves it.

The first example is the Royal Navy in the 19th and early 20th century. The master of the seas. In the absence of any real competitor, how was it supposed to stay in shape? Well, it was hard, it was little by little metamorphosing into a paper tiger. Admiral George Tryon [1] tried to reshape it again into a Nelsonian navy, but he died in the sinking of HMS Victoria in 1893 [2], one of the most consequential events in the history of the world. And one of the most unknown. With Tryon dead, the Royal Navy promoted people like John Jellicoe or David Beatty, one a perfectly competent officer with all the right technical knowledge, but with roughly zero fighting spirit, and the other a raging lion of a man, but too good to bother with the details of how to actually command a fleet. But how would the Royal Navy create an organization where the right people would get promoted, if there was noone to "keep them honest" ?

My second example, or counterexample is the pair that was the exact opposite of Jellicoe/Beatty. It was King/Nimitz. I would argue that this was the most fortunate pair of boss/subordinate in the history of naval warfare. King was as aggressive as Beatty, or more. The ultimate no-nonsense guy, hated by many because he was so frank and intolerant to fools. We owe King the decision to follow Midway with Guadalcanal, and then to keep Japan on the ropes from that point on until the end of the war. But of course, nobody remembers Ernest King today, because one thing is to have the idea, another one is to execute. And Nimitz was the one who executed flawlessly. In my book, Midway is well ahead of Trafalgar or Tsushima. At both Trafalgar and Tsushima you had a better fleet obliterating the worse one. But at Midway, it was the underdog that won. And won because Nimitz put all the pieces of the puzzle in the right place ahead of time. Replace Nimitz with Nelson, or Togo, or Yamamoto, and the US loses at Midway. But Nimitz did it, and with it basically won the war in the Pacific.

My puzzle is this: how was it possible for a nation at peace to create an organization like the US Navy that promoted Ernest King and Chester Nimitz (and Spruance, and Halsey)? I don't have an answer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Tryon

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_HMS_Victoria

- US flew quite a number of sorties that weren’t directly effective, at high casualties, to delay and “stuff up” the Japanese fleet

- US use of kamikaze attack rattled the Japanese command

- Miles Browning wrote a paper about exactly the tactic used at Midway against the Japanese [1]

You can (and the US did) shuffle commanders as needed — but you can’t suddenly create enlisted to do the dirty work or experts with the right ideas. Those require existing culture. Similarly, with a robust industrial base, you can pivot your manufacturing efforts (eg, battleships to carriers) — but you can’t build entirely new factories of skilled workers very quickly (eg, US struggles to build shells for Ukraine).

Perhaps this is a simplistic view, but I don’t think you can have the right military at the start of a conflict; you can only develop a robust, rapidly adaptable military base. That is, you can only make the military anti-fragile.

My advice would be to ignore the admirals (since you can always get new ones), and instead focus on quality NCOs, junior officers, and economics: they’re the backbone/framework of any future victory.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Browning

"Here are the parts of a full solution, pick a favorite to the exclusion of others."

So... Probably the one that despite a specialty has the greatest strength in all the others. Certainly one who appreciates all the others as well as the other aspects you didn't mention

After that, it'll be back to leading charges of soldiers equipped with sticks and stones. I imagine any idiot will be able to figure that out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

The one who is most flexible and has the best ooda loop when under pressure.

It may be that one side's OODA loop is dysfunctional - perhaps they have to wait on higher headquarters to respond, or has an indecisive leader - before acting and that introduces a delay that an opponent can take advantage of.

How to get a tighter OODA loop? Practice. And modeling/war-gaming in advance any potential actions so your responses become automatic. Or at least "good enough".

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_Viscount...

Very few of these monarchies exist now. Many of them fell in the aftermath of WW1, and some of the big remaining ones fell in the aftermath of WW2. A positive of this is that now the remaining monarchies see war not as a means to extending their wealth, but, if on the losing side, as a means to ending them entirely. This didn't use to be the case, as previously losing monarchies might be given the opportunity to fold into the conquering monarchy as a subordinate power or noble.

> 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.

Hitler started WW2 to annex Ukraine because of its fertile soil. Basically he wanted colonies without the inconvenience of dealing with the sea. Like soviets and Americans had.

Shortly after WW2 it ceased to make sense to invade for farming land.

It's not the only factor (nukes are another), but it is a very significant factor.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, just that we should be very very careful treating the wars like they were unrelated incidents. They absolutely were not.

Ehh......

WWI is complicated, but it essentially boils down to a great power war caused by a breakdown in relations that reached the point that diplomats were unwilling or incapable of keeping the war from breaking out. The result of WWI was that all of the traditional great powers (both those who won and lost) were spent [1]. The peace treaty sought to see the victors compensated by the losers, and part of the compensation was breaking them up in the vain hope that this would make war less likely, with some parts being carved up into independent countries, and others (especially colonies) being annexed to the victors.

WWII isn't so much a single war as it is four (sets of) wars of naked territorial aggression (Germany, Italy, Soviet, and Japanese) and two civil wars (China and France) that got merged into a single conflict by the fact that everyone ended up aligning into one side or the other. These wars don't start just before WWI; in many cases, the territorial jealousies that precipitate the war can't start until after WWI (e.g., how can Russia start seeking to invade its neighboring countries when they're still part of Russia?).

In between these two conflicts is a very large series of civil wars and revolutions and failed revolutions that are largely born from the instability of the international political sphere following the exhaustion of all great powers in WWI. These (relatively) smaller conflicts provide a more or less continuous segue between WWI and WWII, to the point that it may be better to just think of the period from 1914 to 1949 as a modern Thirty Years' War that sees the world shift from a balance-of-power regime involving the major European powers to a world that involves just two superpowers and their alliances.

[1] The US was the only major country not economically devastated by the war, but despite its economic size, its unwillingness to participate in European affairs means it's not really a great power as far as people at the time were heavily concerned--it doesn't enter the stage until WWI.

A weak showing by the European aristocrats. Clueless bunch.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchies_in_Europe#Territori...

Perhaps the declining role monarchs across the world was a causal factor there -- countries of citizens trained to live with a highly authoritarian structure, who because of prior experience gravitated towards fascism/communism (also highly authoritarian)

    1. Just before WW2 the Haber Bosch process ... was invented
    2. for fixing atmospheric nitrogen into fertilizers/explosives 
    3. (same thing basically). 
    4. Shortly after the war it was widespread,
    5. and since then there was no starvation in any developed or even semi-developed country.
    6. Hitler started WW2
    7. to annex Ukraine 
    8. because of its fertile soil.
    9. Basically he wanted colonies 
    10. without the inconvenience of dealing with the sea.
    11. Like soviets and Americans had.
    12. Shortly after WW2 
    13. it ceased to make sense to invade for farming land.
    14. It's not the only factor (nukes are another), but it is a very significant factor. 

Ukraine wasn't a distinct state then. There were many many factors involved [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_II

That has no relevance.

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.

Vietnam doesn't invalidate the long peace, no. At least I'm not aware of any academic arguments to that effect, they may exist, I haven't studied this stuff since college.

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.

So for countries that lose the economic competition, might war be a 'better' option?

We don't, though. The article treats with this. In fact per capita deaths to state violence are down remarkably over the last century, all over the world. The perception, due to the reach of modern media, is that war is everywhere. But the truth on the ground is very different.

Two hundred years ago, almost everyone knew someone who died in a war, or saw a war come through their home. Now? It's a notable rarity.

On the other hand, there are countries that aren't necessarily within this hegemony, and anything from warlordism to outright nation state warfare is liable to be taking place.

Would the threat of getting humiliatingly curb-stomped by NATO have been enough to dissuade Russia from invading? Maybe, but it would certainly have provided more of a disincentive than the current state of affairs where Russia can use the threat of nukes to keep NATO at bay. I'd bet a hypothetical nuke-less Russia would have stayed in their own borders and been content to get rich off fossil fuels. On balance, the existence of nuclear weapons probably still prevents more wars than it starts, but Russia having nukes seems like an exception to the rule.

WW2 was just before nukes, and also had actors like the Nazis that were completely off the spectrum - where they would eradicate or dominate opponents if they were to win.

We then saw the Cold War, where the Soviets and US never felt compelled to have an open confrontation because the costs were so high and the end goals of both sides weren't to conquer the other (just carve up the rest of the world as much as possible).

Now we're at China vs the US -- they are competing over future influence but the costs of confrontation are too high.

Putin/Russia thought the Ukraine thing would be a quick victory where the West would be too slow/split to act effectively in time and then they would solidify the new "facts on the ground" easily.

you're actually saying that any war is OK as long as the USA starts it.

it's an expression of: "do as the USA tells you to do; do not do what the USA itself does"

the 'grown up view' is that there are trade-offs. the USA is an empire... I define the essence of an empire to be: a group of people from one place telling people from another place what to do. the most often thing they're told is to pay tribute (which by this point is part of a semi-obscure system of taxes, tariffs, technological transfers, and other hidden things)

And no one else really has this ability, take the Iraq War which was exceptionally vile - did the US get sanctioned for it? Nope, because sanctioning the US is basically shooting yourself in the foot. Even today it's still about a quarter of global GDP and a huge buyer of everyone else's stuff.

Bush Jr. has been convicted of war crimes in at least one country because of his actions with respect to the Iraq war: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35397/b...

Very few countries are opposed to the US invasion of Afghanistan, as those plotting the previous attack on the US were doing so from a position of sanctuary in Afghanistan at the time.

Wars of genuine self defense are basically automatically approved by standard international law: https://legal.un.org/repertory/art51.shtml

How often has the US been at not-war in that period?

EDIT: although to be clear, the last time I checked, I believe the stats still back up that overall fatalities from military conflict have been at historic lows. I generally prefer what little Hegemonic Stability there may be to the multipolar shitshows of the early 20th and mid-to-late 19th centuries.

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

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.

The argument can't be about overall fatalities, but about overall conflicts (and the numbers/proportion of people involved in such). Medical and sanitation technology alone has dramatically decreased the human-life cost of war, at least in proportion to total population.

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 spending to cold war levels to have a chance of taking on China. This has a tremendous cost, culturally and economically.

If they don't, we'll see (as we are seeing) increased global disorder and rearmament by, for example, European and Asian powers. This will likely lead to more wars in the future.

One thing I am certain of: humans didn't just spontaneously become peaceful after WWII. Some energy is being expended to maintain what passes for global peace, and that energy will have to continue being expended for any conceivable time scale.

I mean, even if there was no China. OK. Great. Now what? You've still got India giving Russia as many drones as Russia desires every month. Is India, or even South Africa for that matter, ever going to lose its ability to produce drones for Russia? No.

The essential problem is that we live in a multi-polar world. Multiple nations can sustain themselves. Multiple nations can arm themselves. Multiple nations can exert influence in arenas that previously only the West could exert influence. China, the US, India, Russia, the EU. All of these power centers are realities, and they all sometimes have conflicting agendas. We're even reaching a point where they need each other less and less. In fact, the linkages in terms of, for example, global trade at times may be driving some of the problems. (See climate change.)

I'm not sure we know how to operate in this world. We focus so much on one "adversary", and without fail, we end up in conflict with another of the global powers or civilizations. I think this is because of the strangeness of this environment to us. Ukraine is a good example. You could argue that we didn't even bother to understand India's position on this before we issued an edict regarding sanctions. An edict that India promptly ignored. That's kind of a tell tale sign that we didn't really understand the underlying environment. Worse, I'm not sure we even tried to understand it? Did anyone ever actually solicit India's input in any meaningful way? I'm not sure they did.

So as long as that lack of understanding persists, I'm pretty sure we'll continue to stumble from one crisis to the next. None of which will be the crisis we plan for.

The long peace doesn't refer to a period without wars. Just to a period with much fewer wars.

Seeing how casually people dismiss the possible effects of a war involving 10,000 of these weapons has caused me to re-evaluate things.

We should have am internationally sanctioned thermonuclear weapons demo every few years, at least once per decade, but less than annually. To remind everyone what's at stake.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/G23s5TX1QRM

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon

We’ve never had a decade without a nuclear test since the 1940s.

I think wilderness camping is the best counter to that kind of thing. Sounds unrelated, but it's one of the most visceral, instinctual ways to get people to remember the reality of physical consequences. Those consequences exist no matter how frustrating or stressful they may be to deal with. If you leave food out, it spoils/you have no food. If you can't find water, you have no water. If you don't sterilize the water/check the source, you get sick. There's no grocery store, no cops, no social media to get support from, no emergency deliveries, no doctor, no credit to extend... nothing but nature and what you carry on your back. If you screw up, you're screwed.

I only did a couple trips like that, but when I got back to highways, cars, skyscrapers, restaurants, etc, I appreciated how amazing it all is, and how it's basically all just a very, very big, complicated campsite that's been built up over a long time. Nothing manmade is a given, and the only thing keeping it together is us. Nature is way bigger than you, and there are no guardrails. If someone launches a nuke, it's not a strategy game or a movie. That's a cliff you don't want to walk anywhere near.

A one or two week backpacking trip in the middle of nowhere should be a graduation requirement, imo. Would have lots of benefits beyond just added perspective about the reality of physical consequences.

Funny thing is, I don't know if there are any Flat Earthers who refuse to use GPS positioning.

Tip: Look for a channel called SciManDan on YT. He has regular debunkings on Flat Earth Fridays, and IIRC many of his Tinfoil Tuesdays are also, if not directly Flerf, at least Flerf-adjacent.

https://goo.gl/maps/MqkLCrLqNr4usuj29

Seems like we did enough of this already.

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.

Economic warfare can resemble the sieges of traditional warfare. Yemen was blockaded "economically" to prevent food and medical aid from entering the country. Syrians were only getting an hour of electricity per day in recent memory because of economic strictures preventing them from importing oil. It can get pretty brutal.

It's economic, cyber, covert, cultural and other less noticeable sieges that cause collapse from the inside.

Deglobalization is an attempt to make war feasible because some strong countries feel like they are losing economic war and want to fall back on real 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.

No need to trade any goods if said goods can be just be taken (assuming one's side wins).

I'm sure most of us are aware of the gulags that China ran in 2022, in the most prosperous city like Shanghai, with welded doors, lack of food, arbitrary killing of pets, moving their own citizens against their wills to camps or cells with no running water and unsanitary conditions. with cries in tall buildings from families in the middle of night for food. If. you haven't seen these things, go watch it online. Imagine if somehow China succeeded, and that's most of humanity's fate.

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 economically by spending 1/3 of the US. This is money that the US could be using to build a high speed rail network or educating its citizens.

"build a high speed rail network", implying that US is failing there. China is suffering from a $1 TRILLION debt for its rails https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/China-debt-crunch/C..., while ridership collapses https://japan-forward.com/weak-demand-for-chinas-high-speed-.... Cities in China are suffering from $23 TRILLION insolvent debt and inability to raise more https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-05-21/china-s-2.... I certainly hope US doesn't suffer the same fate.

Erasing debts wipes out (most) savings and hurts rich people. So it's not something that can be done lightly, but it is an option.

Also, Chinese HSR ridership is back up after COVID restrictions were lifted.

It is. You can erase all debts by hyperinflation, for example.

China for sure has problems, but it's not the "crashing down tomorrow" kind of problems. They still have a robust growth, now that COVID restrictions are over.

China is on its way out.

It's amazing how many racists come out in these threads.

China's population is projected to peak at 1.7B by 2060 and then fall to 1.5B by the century's end: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2023/04/24/c...

If anything, China is leading the world at trying to live with a static population numbers (and EVERYONE will have to do it eventually).

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

I feel for those who don't get that they are supporting evil.

Btw, speaking of evil, China isn't giving up yet (Xi still have 10-20 years to live. free organ transplants from young Chinese, you know. high ranking politicians get them for free). It is producing destroyers at a massive rate, and will exceed # of destroyers that US has by 2040. Combined with the millions of disposable unemployed single young men, and there's still a chance that Taiwan would overwhelmed. and if Taiwan falls, the same strategy can be used to conquer Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Australia.

Bear in mind that China has pretty much no oil and these 055 destroyer boats are diesel&gas turbine powered. And the US has been slowly winding down military presence since the Cold War ended basically[1].

And lemme tell you, if Taiwan goes hot, there wont be any USN boats spare to patrol the Middle East -> South China sea route, and nobody would be angry if any oil tankers on that route go missing.

[1]: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/graph-of-the-week-why-flee...

Well, then they are lucky that Russia, now sanctioned by the West, has no choice but to sell all their oil to China, at discount prices.

Frankly highlighting China dependence on maritime trade is a cope. It just won’t matter much in hot war.

Nah. Ship.

Otherwise it's the common battle between "orderliness at any cost" and freedoms. US or Europe seems to strike a better balance, for all of their shortcomings. In China its ruled by the CCP with an iron fist.

We are living in the pax Americana right now, but it is unclear how long that will last.

“Another” than what? This was exactly what TFA was about.

I’m getting such Beltway Think Tank vibes for some reason.

This particular take is basically a standard neorealist perspective on how to explain the impact of globalization in reducing conflict. Basically allowing that trade changes the playing field, without allowing that states might be anything other than selfish entities, or that there might be any relevant entities to consider in international affairs (like nonstate actors, cultural power, etc). Other schools of IR theory take different perspectives, but neorealism is basically the foundational view of western foreign policy.

Invading Iraq or trying to create democracy in Libya or getting Finland to join NATO is, basically, some attempt to create stability at a distance - as misguided and chaotic as the results may be. Engaging in actual, direct war the way Putin has would be unthinkable; it would be like taking your pants off at a dinner party.

[edit] 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.

[edit #2] the article's flaw isn't that it (rightly) locates the source of both peace and war in the profit-making capacities of companies and governments; the flaw is in its fanciful belief (and the subject of the piece) that this has somehow led to a neutered military situation of which the present Russian losses are proof. They are no proof, and the situation is more dangerous and ambiguous than ever, partially as a result of the ongoing neutering of one of the three important millitaries in the world at the hands of the most powerful alliance. Wish that it were not so, but this destabilizes what had up until now been a grouping that was mostly driven by profit.

But Libya was not in jest.

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 on a doctrine that security for ourselves needed democracy abroad, especially in the Middle East and North Africa. Let me make the alternative case for a second: Helping democratic movements in the ME/NA was a misguided proposition, as obviously the region has zero history of popular governance and the only actual alternative to authoritarian rule there on the ground is, and has always been, hardcore 7th century Islamism which is among other uglinesses and human rights abuses, deeply unfriendly to us. And therefore it was a fool's errand to overthrow any dictator in the ME, because they were the ones keeping the street quiet.

Okay, now that I've made that case, here's the case for helping overturn Qaddafi and try for Libyan democracy: He was murdering his own people. He had done, and he would do it again. And given the climate, his state would become again a breeding ground for terrorism as it had been in the 70s and 80s.

Personally, I think it was stupid, but I don't think it was wrong in the sense that Russia invading Ukraine was wrong - precisely because I don't think propping up a dictatorship is morally valid, the way Russia was propping up Ukraine before 2014 and the way it still does in Belarus and all the former Soviet states.

What I'm saying is that the moral decisions are frequently poor strategic decisions, and they rarely work in concert, but the failure of one doesn't nullify the other; nor do our strategic failures provide justification for the moral failures of others. If something is wrong then replicating it would also be wrong, no?

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.)

I don’t know whether you are blaming the populace for these wars or saying that they sabotaged them enough so that they didn’t become worse.