Reasons to Fear Another ‘Great War’
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I'd also suggest the last time countries were so dominant in certain military areas, they didn't overlap as much as they do today, so open conflict was easier to maintain. In the early 1800's France was the undisputed world leader when it came to land based combat, while the British maintained a serious advantage at sea. Today, the US is undisputed in all 3 categories, land, air, sea, and a 4th if you count space. If another country were able to take a commanding lead in at least 1 of those areas, perhaps we could see a high intensity conflict involving the US, however until that happens, there isn't much of a point.
Minor Edit: This isn't intended as support of the current situation.
* The US economy and industrial power is dependent on IT and brittle supply chains. Nobody knows how much the cyber infrastructure holding this up is already compromised.
* Russian S-400s can already deny air superiority to Israeli planes, which are not far behind US planes.
* How does the US have space superiority when there is no ASAT defense besides MAD?
* The US has not been able to suppress a rebellion in Afghanistan with trillions of dollars and 17 years. Maybe in an actual war their hands would be untied, so this isn't the best point.
* The US Navy loses war-games to swarm attacks and is just now a decade later deploying solutions to this. When was the last time US ships actually had to fight? Vietnam?
* The US has increasing ethnic and social conflicts, not to mention the potential fifth column of residents with ties to enemy powers.
* Barely half of US fighter planes are combat ready at any given moment. The trillion dollar F-35 had to be flown with VFR the first time it crossed the IDL. Who knows what else is lurking in that software?
That said - * The S-400 is an impressive system. The Russians have so built ~300 of them, and like any system, the soft factors are more important than the paper facts suggest. Training, deployment, doctrine, and strategic/tactical goals would greatly affect the viability of it on any modern battlefield.
* Space Superiority is more than just ASAT capabilities, but its an area that few other countries have ever even attempted, and with the US's dominance in rocket technology (arguably anyway) and high altitude laser platforms, I'm fairly confident it would be a stalemate at best, with even the closest competitor. I would agree its an area of US defense that will need special attention over the next ~10 years.
* Insurgency =/= Great War.
* OIF was heavily supported by carrier based aircraft, and there are exactly zero countries that posses a modern enough navel force to threaten US control of the actual blue water areas. US Submarine technology is decades ahead of everyone else at this point. There are concern developments in this area, but again, we're talking "Great War"
* True point. Wars tend to get people pointed in the same direction though. Especially "Great Wars"
* US pilots put in more seat time than every other country combined. This is a factor that cannot be overstated. Putting 10x the number of the worlds best plane in the air means nothing if the actual operator cannot leverage those tools effectively.
In the end, these are all great points as to why the US has room to improve its lead, but none of them really address the core point which is that the US is currently the undisputed leader in almost every military category, and any "Great War" involving the US would be a very lopsided affair. You're more than welcome to pick your challenger and we can see how long it takes me to make a list twice as long with their problems, although I can't guarantee I'll actually spend the time doing that today :)
Yes, the initial superiority of one military is greater by a large margin and will remain that way for some time to come. But I think it's misleading wording to say it "has room to improve its lead", simply due to the fact that emerging powers are improving a greater rate, and it's economically unreasonable to believe otherwise.
Plus, no individual actor made the decision to plunge their mighty military power into the conflagration that became WWI.
I keep reading articles on the argument that carriers CAN be sunk. One article argued that only a nuclear attack could do it, but its argument was unsubstantiated. Swarm tactics and drone warfare are emerging game-changers in conventional warfare. More than anything, initial phases of WWIII would be missile warfare. Carrier groups can defend against hypersonic, but cannot do so reliably.
Combine this with a risky false impression - that war could be contained regionally. Would the symbolism of sinking a carrier be enough to have the U.S. back out of the contested East Asian theaters?
I can't answer that question, and it worries me that I can't. If the answer was certain either way, war would be less likely. As it stands, I could see certain gambles being both plausible, and terrifyingly dangerous.
Turn the military loose and Afghanistan will resemble a parking lot full of very submissive people.
Soldiers in combat have tighter rules of engagement with the enemy than US Police force have to follow when interacting with citizens. Let that sink in.
That said, during those rare moments of clarity on the Afghan battlefield, there was zero doubt with respect to the outcome.
The S-400 is, like all major Russian weapon systems, an enigma. In the past, the Russian were capable of producing some excellent weapon systems, but they've also been very capable of inflating the capabilities of some real stinkers. The Mig 25 Foxbat comes to mind for example. All of my attempts to find real, verified information on S-400 capabilities have only turned up marketing material and articles quoting the marketing material. There have been no usages of the S-400 system in combat conditions that I am aware of.
It seems the S-400 should be taken seriously, but overestimation can be as dangerous as underestimation. It is possible that the S-400 is simply a rehash of the S-300 system with some of the interceptors having larger motors with longer range. This would still make it a potent system but one with known counters.
Also, FWIW under every circumstance that isn't some kind of military invasion phantasy porn I generally look less positively on our relationship with guns.
[1]http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/fileadmin/docs/T-Briefing-Pap...
I can't imagine the "Red Dawn" scenario of Russian troops invading and occupying US territory. If anything, the goal would be to knock out critical communication/shipping infrastructure to effectively disrupt all normal activity--can't buy or sell, can't get food, can't depend on modern mass communication to organize and maintain order.
Alongside that, the use of modern weapons to do serious damage to centers of power would speed up collapse. That's the goal if your intention is to hit us at our weakest point: catastrophic societal collapse.
If it's our military against some other military, we've got odds as good as anyone else (and almost always better). But if you've knocked out electronic commerce, disrupted civilian use of things like cell networks and internet access, and made it hard enough to get food on supermarket shelves, all those armed people aren't gonna just keep calm and carry on while they're hungry and several cities are burning.
Sure, it's probably a bit too "straight-to-Netflix" but it's much easier for me to imagine someone applying force at the points we're weakest and letting things fall apart than facing off plane vs. plane, ship vs. ship, and tank vs. tank on the battlefield.
The problem is that, even with 393 millions of guns, USA can't stop recurrent fireforests year after year. And this is only an example. Would be naive to think that, as people have a pistol, can't be killed remotely from a million Km of distance. The idea of a foreign army marching in a country and killing people one by one like stormtroopers, is very outdated.
And of course you can always distroy critical areas and then sit and look how the civilians start killing other civilians for water or food. With so many weapons in the table would be even much faster. Is hardly a guarantee.
I was not able to find any sources corroborating that story. Are you confusing it with the F-22?
1988 Operation Praying Mantis [0] during the Tanker War in the Iran-Iraq war. Iran deployed swarm attacks, but only at a small scale. Which was one of the largest US naval battles after WW2.
The US Air Force simply doesn't use it's full fleet at any given moment:
"For example, in 1969, 523 USAF fighter aircraft were deployed to Vietnam or Thailand, only 14 percent of the 3,838 fighters in the USAF inventory that year." [1]
1. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/..., p.20
If you ever get the chance to read old declassified nuclear attack plans against a city, you will see the same. A single nuclear weapon ... just doesn't do it. Those plans involve starting out with something like 10 nuclear explosions (not even directly against the city itself, rather on supporting infrastructure), and then one more every hour or so for 48 hours or even weeks (these plans are/were made for most large cities, and even for US cities where the likely plans for Russian nuclear attacks are created by US to allow for better preparations).
In some ways what you see in the first episode of Battlestar Galactica is somewhat accurate. First, dozens of nuclear explosions make an effective response impossible (e.g. military installations, runways, important bridges, train lines, communication, ...), then a methodical "sweep" with nuclear explosions of the entire city. This cannot be done with one, or even 10, nuclear bombs.
And even pretty bad radar systems can tell the difference between one and tens/hundreds of rockets.
So whilst this is a concern, it can and is eliminated with proper infrastructure and planning.
There will not be information asymmetry once a nuclear attack actually starts happening.
Apparently there are backup systems in both countries that will fire nuclear weapons automatically (!) at predefined targets if certain cities are hit with nuclear attacks - e.g. Washington, Moscow, etc.
That's why deterrence is effective - because any strike can automatically lead to hundreds of millions of people dying (and, if the modelling of nuclear winter is correct, potentially pretty much all large mammals within a few years)...
Keep in mind that Stuxnet is generally figured to be a joint American/Israeli cyberweapon.
[1] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/swedens-super-ste... (and many other similar articles elsewhere)
As of now the US have the greatest army, but if let’s say China were to prepare for it for enough time in a somewhat stealthy way, couldn’t it bring the USA into a long and dirty foght ?
Well, this is one of the reasons a Great War is unlikely - how are you going to do this? Even if you build things up slowly, you still have to store them somewhere. You have to train people. There is no way to create a military force capable of fighting a Great War in today's age without it being obvious.
Which isn't to say that build up can't happen - it's just not going to be a surprise to anyone.
Trained via software updates and built under the guise of something innocent like 'gardener bots'
Force extended requires significant amplification.
So for China to impact us in a meaningful way they would have to somehow sneak a force large enough to damage across a pretty wide open space, then maintain that logistically.
Ditto for the RU
That said once in the US you have 300 million small arms manned by 21+ million veterans in the US
Not sure China can actually get that many boots on the US soil before the Navy / Air get a poke or two at them
Russia is only 55 miles from the US.
This has been rising up like a plague in recent years and it isn't going away any time soon.
When ego and emotion come into play, the question of what is the point because a matter of pride and the point is just to win regardless of the costs.
Honest question: is it possible in your opinion for someone to not believe "my nation/religion/race/etc is superior" yet still be opposed to globalism? To me, this is what nationalism means, international cooperation while unequivocally maintaining the right to national democratic self-determination.
Obviously all that is easier said than done, but really if you stop letting any kind of tribal attachment define you as a person, life becomes a lot simpler.
Are there any fiscal consequences to that, at all? For example, I often read about the advantage of socialized medicare in Canada versus the US, is this difference a figment of people's imagination? Is that a tribalist belief, or acknowledgement of physical & fiscal reality?
> Yes, by disillusioning yourself that any of those things matter. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what god you pray to, because prayer is personal; doesn’t matter what nation you call your own, because emigration is easier than ever; and doesn’t matter what colour your skin is, because it doesn’t define you.
Are you saying it doesn't, or it shouldn't? Because from what I see on the news and read in psychological studies, it seems like there are significant numbers of people, some of whom are scientists, who don't share this interpretation of reality.
> Obviously all that is easier said than done, but really if you stop letting any kind of tribal attachment define you as a person, life becomes a lot simpler.
Is this a fact or a theory? And I don't mean that flippantly or offensively, I think it's a perfectly valid question considering the current political climate.
Couldn't non-democratic societies be nationalist? Was nationalism off-limits to Imperial Japan, for example?
Is it necessary? Is primary Nationalism, but with a willingness to trade and cooperate internationally in a mutually beneficial manner, inherently worse than enthusiastic globalism with no regard for the well-being of one's own individual country? I hear most everyone talking this talk on the world stage, but I don't see a lot of people walking the walk (for example, everyone seems to bargain quite strongly in a self-beneficial way in trade talks, even though that is apparently considered immoral).
This isn’t really the root cause.
It is possible and common to think your group is superior without wishing any harm onto others and without trying to control others.
For example plenty of developers believe static typing is superior to dynamic typing but there are only a few that believe dynamic typing should be banned / driven out of the workplace.
"Somehow". The answer is found quite simply by this formula:
"My [whatever] is the [whatever] I belong to."
Even if you prove without a doubt that Islam is worse that Christianity, or that one race is worse than another, you won't likely convince the members that they therefore deserve less than they have, or that they should surrender to another. The core tautology still holds true.
Eugene Debs went to jail in America for imploring the working class not to fighta rich mans war and many soldiers walked away completely disgusted. Just a few miles from the trenches filled with death, the war profitiers were making a killing offering hotels and foodstuffs to soldiers on leave.
We still have a command economy based on war and our imperial project is still ongoing. We should take the lessons of world war one to heart and refuse to fight and fuel wars of domination and conquest. I can't recall the last time the western world was called to fight a defensive war after WW2, perhaps the only "good" war in our history.
https://www.marxist.com/first-world-war-a-marxist-analysis-o...
Or to make this concrete, the prime minister of the UK in 1914 (and through 1916) was H. H. Asquith. Looking at the wikipedia articles about his sons:
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Asquith -- killed in action in 1916.
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Asquith_(poet) -- served in the artillery in the British Army.
3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Asquith -- wounded four times, lost a leg.
4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_Asquith,_Baron_Asquith_o... -- was in the army, but not on the Western Front.
5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Asquith -- was 12 years old when the war started, 16 when it ended: too young to serve.
I have a hard time seeing Asquith here as "sacrificing other people's children", or at least any more so than sacrificing his own.
That said, I agree that there's way more war-making going on recently than there should be and that it's no longer in style for the upper class to actually put their own skins on the line. But WWI is just not a good example of that tendency.
Will China's big sea grab start a war? So far, they've been able to smother any of their neighbor's push back, and have just ignored any international rulings against them.
What about when they invade Taiwan, which they've said they will do? What about when they take over some of Japan's islands, which they said they would do?
They seem to be going down this path where they think if they just push a calculated amount each time, it won't cause a big problem. It's exactly that kind of thinking that is the problem, though.
And China's not the only aggressive, belligerent country out there. There's also Russia (Crimea/Ukraine, Syria) and Iran (Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon), for example. At what point do their aggressions spill over into a larger conflict?
But no-one (for other than ideological purposes) ever mistook the US for a fundamentally peaceable nation (internally or externally).
War is an extension of politics.
What?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mili...
Except the local militias that would inevitably form, and would cause considerable losses on the US side, leading to poor public appetite for war
See: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan
Indian here. Colonization is just a placeholder term to describe resource grab. There is no real chance England could have annexed India.
Why do all this annexation business, and offer the other country free citizenships? All you have to do is militarily control the country while you can take their resources and ship to your homeland.
>>This whole land grabbing kind of war ended to be a thing with WW 2.
Territorial control often has further ulterior motives. Like grabbing useful land, or creating buffer zones etc.
Mexico came a long time ago, we aren't doing stuff like that anymore. Except when we invade small countries like panama, that we still do.
I wonder what kinds of things history will be saying about the United States in 200 years, a nation who probably didn't take the brutish British approach to invasion, but has tripwire forces-I mean "installations" dotted all over everyone else's back yards instead.
Without the US, the world would be a sh*tshow. The tripwire bases prevent the likes of Russia putting its paws on Eastern Europe or China snatching more islands they claim as there own.
Back when the Serbs were genociding their Muslim citizens, Europe was inept while the US saved the day, as usual.
The US enjoys the status quo - most military interventions are to maintain it.
We'll ignore Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq (twice) for the sake of this comment?
Also lets ignore all those south american Coup d'états because it helps the narrative.
This is false. Have you heard of the korean war or the vietnam war? Or the afghanistan/iraqi war? There are ( and have been ) powers that opposed the US ( sometimes successfully ). Look at current day syria.
> Since they are not doing so, its hard to call them belligerent.
What? We have been in a state of perpetual aggressive war ever since ww2 ( frankly since the american revolution war if we are being honest ).
> The British Empire was way worse than the USA all things considered.
It may or may not have been worse. But being belligerent isn't a relative matter of comparison. It's a matter of state. It's like being pregnant. You are pregnant or you are not.
When perceived benefits outweigh costs. The US's multiple invasions of, and coup plots against, other countries didn't 'spill over into a larger conflict' because the US's power & ruthlessness have been well-understood by the world. The costs of resisting US militaristic aggression have just been too high. The same has applied to Russia, and perhaps will in China's case if it makes good on its threats (though it would have to fight on multiple fronts for decades to even approach US levels of aggression).
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999
Yemen 2002
Iraq 1991-2003 (US/UK on regular basis)
Iraq 2003-2015
Afghanistan 2001-2015
Pakistan 2007-2015
Somalia 2007-8, 2011
Yemen 2009, 2011
Libya 2011, 2015
Syria 2014-2016And while they were saving Muslims from genocide in the Balkans, what islands did they steal?
Not all acts of war are the same.
So yeah, not all wars are the same, but people suffer all the same.
But the US also acts through a democracy, while the countries mentioned above do not. I can criticize the stupid policies of the US in a public forum. The citizens of the countries listed above can not. Democracy is not the equivalent of an oligarchy or tyranny. The people of a country are different from the government that represents them. Unelected governments are illegitimate and a danger to the free world despite what their minions of propaganda post.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Life_in_the_Emerald_C...
The fact is that the US is a global aggressor just as much as the other countries on the list.
If you're referring to the NATO bombing of Serbia, then you are incorrect -- there was no genocide in Kosovo.
The justification for the Western intervention (100,000's of people murdered by Serbia) was a lie [1] [2], and Milosevic (the "Butcher of the Balkans") was exonerated of the charges of war crimes, twice [3] [4].
[1] https://www.newstatesman.com/europe/2008/08/pilger-kosovo-wa...
[2] https://www.newstatesman.com/node/151946
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/28/warcri...
[4] https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-hague-tribunal-exonerates-...
Just because he was personally exonerated does not imply no genocide happened.
It seems there is a war against Radical religious terrorists which is stateless and more regional, and stopping dictators.
If the US cared about stopping "dictators", why are there so many dictators allies of the US?
Countries which support the Al-Nusra front, which was affiliated to Al-Qaeda, which masterminded 9/11 an event which 90% of the terrorists were from Saudi Arabia or other gulf countries and 0 from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or Iran.
The concept of righteous crusades has been around forever and it's stunning that it still works.
The previous few presidents got the US involved in lots of stupid wars. This president has expressly said he doesn't want to do that and has avoided it.
"With us or with the terrorists" definitely had a authoritarian bent to it
They are ramping up ‘engagements’ in Africa not lowering them.
> The previous few presidents got the US involved in lots of stupid wars. This president has expressly said he doesn't want to do that and has avoided it.
I'm not sure how you can find fault with Obama and Clinton but absolve Trump. What do you make of his continuation of the many wars we are involved in? Or his bombings in Syria?
While explicit declarations of war don't exist, airstrikes and threats do.
Trump has accelerated bombing rates over the Obama administration: https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/09/donald-trump-is-droppin...
Trump has threatened Iran: https://fox8.com/2018/07/23/trump-tweets-explosive-threat-to...
Trump has threatened North Korea: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-un-north-...
Trump has an extraordinary ability to do and say whatever is to his momentary perceived advantage. He's excellent at creating scary distractions; note how the sinister migrant caravan, so dangerous as to require thousands of US troops on the border, became a non-issue as soon as the election was over.
There are many who have made the case that Trump is a clear authoritarian. Today there's a great thread from David Neiwart on the topic: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1062018162500153344.html
And authoritarians definitely love external threats, creating them as necessary, just as Trump did with the migrant caravan.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2018/04/21/Iranian-g...
Iran is training proxies in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine to attack Israel. And that's what they're doing. They just launched a missile barrage, the largest ever, at Israel.
It seems that Israel is just defending its existence.
World War I did not start because Austria had a legitimate grievance against Serbia that it was determined to settle with military force. It started because France, Germany, and Russia were all willing, maybe even eager, to go to war and the putative Third Balkan War in as many years was an opportunity to do so. When the leaders of Germany and Russia started getting cold feet and asked about partial mobilization as an alternative option, the military commands were shocked and worked assiduously to convince them that there was no alternative to complete war. In stark contrast stands the Cuban Missile Crisis, where Kennedy and Khrushchev both ignored their military commands' pleas for war and sought to find alternatives to war.
The ingredients for global war are international disputes irreconcilable except for war; a conflict that can serve as a flashpoint to rapidly bring in these wide international disputes; and you need leaders who can continue to escalate the war, knowing all the consequences it might entail. The Middle East simply lacks strategic importance to make two major power blocs go to global war in support of their local allies in a localized conflict.
There are aggressive factors on all sides of that conflict and there's no clear-cut good or bad guy; only unfortunate things happening to real people who'd all be better off if religion stayed inside the walls of one's dwelling and temple of worship.
Also if in cases of contested buildings listed above, everyone had equal access to the area administered by a neutral outside party.
I think quite the opposite, I believe they wanted the current leadership to stay, consequences and means of enforcement and human rights be damned. (it's also contrary to the US's wishes, for right or wrong). They want the status quo, cuz it's their only navy base on the Mediterranean. source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_involvement_in_the_Syr...
Gain land/people? If there's a thriving economy there, war will probably change that quickly. If there's no thriving economy, what's the point?
You could try to exploit the people/resources there, but the profits in that seem (at least compared to a world power) pretty thin. Unskilled labor and unimproved land are just not worth what they used to be.
Specific resources might become dramatically more valuable. Seems not terribly likely with oil (more technology, more producers, more alternatives). Maybe water, but the obvious pressure for that would be population, which is somewhat leveling off (though maybe global warming would do it).
I would think any modern war would be very different and less bloody than we're used to. Some kind of weird power play that results in a takeover but is not disruptive enough to damage what was taken. Something more like Russia taking Crimea and less like Germany invading Poland.
This practice is pervasive throughout most of the economy and there is very little planning for any disruptions in any supply chains whatsoever. The decades of relative peace, prosperity, expanded trade, and global growth have tricked everyone into thinking nothing will ever disrupt anything at all. That's probably a mistake.
This kind of foolishness may have some serious consequences at some point. We've also become substantially more dependent on a number of nations for constant imports of raw materials and food as well. And we've largely stopped manufacturing pretty much everything which means we also get almost everything sent to us. This could be a real serious issue if there is a sudden large-scale war and a number of countries we rely upon aren't on the same side as ours. And from an economic perspective, business conditions have been pretty sweet for companies over the last 30-40 years outside of a few catastrophic events. Is there even anyone in the business world left at this point that even remembers what it's like to have to survive on low debt and increasing interest rates? Companies have just expected ever-lower interest rates since the early to mid 80's and they've been able to rollover debt easily and take out more money to fund operations. Is there anyone left who has actually managed large businesses in an environment that was less predictable?
The point of war in the modern world may in fact be the denial of a thriving economy or industrial base to an adversary. For instance in a large scale nuclear war many of the plans call for the destruction of enemy nuclear weapons as to protect your own infrastructure/population and to destroy enemy infrastructure/population to gain an economic and industrial advantage after the war ends.
War is also not always an economic calculation: humanitarian concerns, revenge, fear, upholding the law, alliances and thoughts of glory can often motivate a conquest that holds no real value to the victor.
Why did Alexander engage in his wars? He didn't seem to particularly enjoy the job of government.
What was the economic value to Rome of destroying Carthage?
Obviously the animosity between the two played a huge part in the desire to salt the fields of Carthage, but that is almost exactly how The Entente and the Central powers felt towards each other after 2 years of war - neither of them could stomach laying down their arms, because so much blood had been spilt. So they had to keep going, and going, and going
Lets hope sunk cost fallacy doesn't doom our global civilization. =/
But within next decade world would realize that democrats/socialists are temporary elites filling the vacuum created by the global transition from monarchy to technocracy. This is why there will not be a WW3. Because those who are competent enought to make big money, are making it in tech. There will also not be a global resource war because such mega needs are $$$ opportunity, you can bet there are future-$$$onaires working at this problem this very second.
"The British author Norman Angell would immortalize himself by suggesting, just a few years before World War I, that what we would now call globalization had rendered great-power conflict obsolete. War, he argued, had become futile because peace and the growing economic and financial linkages between the major European states were producing so much prosperity."
Global warming/water shortages causing a country into forced migration seems like an obvious one, as the alternative is death for that state.
Or a government might view starting a war to prevent itself from being removed from power to be acceptable.
World war may be unlikely, but regional conflicts between desperate governments still seem pretty likely.
The point of the article is that people thought WWI would not only be impossible, but that it would also be "bloodless". It turned out to be the bloodiest war the world had ever seen.
The future big wars will (eventually) turn the world into an apocalyptic hellscape, but the beginning will be fought with robots and big guns. Less infantry, but more damage. Lots more civilians dying of starvation, cold, disease, once critical infrastructure gets taken out. People in cities are mostly dependent on utilities, so once those go, it's going to get chaotic. Also we don't really have industry anymore, so a trade embargo might totally erode our ability to wage war once we exhaust our surpluses.
The annexing of Crimea was "less bloody" because nobody attempted military intervention to stop it. If this sort of thing continues it will result in war that will absolutely involve plenty of blood being shed.
Thinking this is fundamentally different from how various wars started in previous eras is a mistake.
also the point of war is simply about power, or to make the other nation/state/population submit to your demands, and the actions of leaders and their path towards war are not always transparent or easy to spot from a rational observers point of view. I saw this the other day (actually came across it here on HN) and really enjoyed the perspective it puts on power and what people incentives drive those that have it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
A point of war is a complete destruction of enemy country, its population, culture, economy, grinding it to all to dust. Enemy being crushed, hunted to the last man, turned into animal by fear. Making enemy fear you more than death — this is the point of war.
You think you know a thing about war? Western people, thinking of war as a ritual sabre rattling with some symbolic bloodshed just to motivate the enemy to accept talks on their terms, know nothing about war.
If Western powers would enter a war with that idea in heads of their leaders, I am afraid to image what the outcome will be. The West is too used to think of wars as wars of politicians. Genghis khan was not a politician, and the next man to follow his steps wouldn't be either.
It bugs me that thinking of states as rational actors is called "foreign policy realism".
To create reasons to keep funding the military industrial complex.
To assert political and economical power.
Think of Catholicism vs. Protestantism in the European Wars of Religion. The injustice of slavery vs. Southern honor in the American Civil War. Nationalism and alliances in WW1. The superiority of the Aryan Race in Nazi Germany. Capitalism vs. communism in the Cold War and conflicts (Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Central America) within it.
Nazism was fundamentally irrational (and its irrationality led directly to the downfall of Nazi Germany), but that didn't stop it from plunging the whole world into war.
There are plenty of similar flash points in the world today. The current U.S. government includes numerous people for whom the idea of the U.S. as a Christian country is sacred - hell, the acting Attorney General just said that he could not support secular judicial nominees. Economic development (to the extent that it enriches the secular, heathen, and heretical) is part of the problem there, as it profanes the Christian moral fabric of America. Similarly, the progressive left in the U.S. has their own sacred idea: equality. Economic development, to them, is a net negative to the extent that it benefits entrenched corporations or privileged groups.
And then the WW1 broke out.
Dan Carlin gives the relevant background quite good.
https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-bluepr...
Natural resources are often one point.
Access to key geographies are another (e.g., sea access.)
Note: NOT justifying this, just recounting the past 20yrs.
Afghanistan
Anjouan
Crimea
Gambia
Georgia
Iraq
Lebanon
Somalia
Syria
Syria - to stop natural gas pipeline from Qatar’s north Field through Syria on to Turkey and to the EU. Gasprom owners are worried again.
Afghanistan, Iraq - because of 9/11.
Maybe all of these were really about resources?
Everyone knew war was a economically foolish action (although many believed “reparations” would cover the cost), but WWI happened anyway. They believed that the war would be cheap and over quickly- the troops deployed in August would be home by Christmas.
I agree with the worrying trends the article notes. There are two countervailing trends that help stabilize the current system though- one is nuclear weapons, which really make clear the potential costs of conflict, and the other is the consistent success of Guerillia warfare and insurgencies since WWII, which all major powers except China have experienced in recent memory, reminding them of the costs of ground warfare.
As opposed to run-of-the-mill 'defense spending', wherein materiel and training costs are limited by the nature of routine budgetary apparatus, an active war consumes gargantuan supplies of goods, from weapons and ordnance to socks and coffee, that need to be constantly replenished. And technical costs are free to spiral because the notion of failure in automated systems, communications, etc, is terrible to countenance.
Funding is also easier to get during an active war because, well, 'THIS IS WAR!' The point in this thread from restalis about salesmanship is spot-on.
It's also worth noting that the equities / stocks associated with war-oriented corporations are tremendously widespread in terms of portfolio inclusion. Nearly everybody has Lockheed, General Dynamics, etc etc etc in their retirement fund [for the somewhat circular reason that those stocks generally do perform in the long term].
Also, industrial goods today have complex global supply chains, unlike in the past. In 1914 perhaps the worst French import that Germans lost was something like luxury foodstuffs. Today it might be more like, nobody can build X smartphone or airplane because one of its critical parts is only made in one place, and building an identical plant on this side of the war border will take several years. There's a multiplier on the economic damages here, because losing the ability to trade for a $5 chip might mean your economy loses a $500 smartphone.
That's not to say this makes a big war impossible, but shutting down trade would be vastly more painful today than back then.
Always has been, always will be.
People either want more power or are concerned about losing it. Either way, the cause of war is always power.
I consider “fear” to be about power too, as it’s usually about fear of losing power of some sort. WWI is probably the best example.
The entire point of the article is to not ignore history.
If your worldview is grounded in the apocalyptic - eg. incoming ecological disaster - you will get people who are willing to wage war if they are persuaded it is preventable and certain nations are impeding it. That's just one example; militant theocracy would be another worldview driven towards war, as well.
In general, it's mindshare that I could see driving more war, a push to add more people under the overall worldview of a nation or coalition, similar to what we saw under the Soviet Union.
Gold. Credit. Mines. Water, forests. Strategic positions.
E.g. I wouldn't be surprised if China has considered invading Mongolia, potentially worth trillions of US$ in minerals alone.
Find the amount of yellow peril in this thread amusing. I guess no one really worries about the numerous invasions by US/UK/Allies
That said, your "50 years" number is conveniently eliding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War which was closer to 40 years ago. Just because China failed to invade successfully doesn't change the fact that it invaded.
As for China's future actions, we'll see what they are. So far, the territorial claims they are making are not looking like they will lead to peace in the future.
For the rest, the people not worrying about invasions by US/UK/Allies live in those countries, I expect.
The winners are going to want the resources -- and maybe a select subset of the losing populations, if opportunity provides.
The point of war today is the same as it was throughout history - wealth.
> Some kind of weird power play that results in a takeover but is not disruptive enough to damage what was taken.
That's the best scenario. Where concessions are made to avoid wars.
> Something more like Russia taking Crimea and less like Germany invading Poland.
Well Germany first took rhineland, sudetenland and austria before invading poland. Not saying we are going to escalate to ww2 levels, but in war, just like in life, it's baby steps before we really start to get going.
A war like no other?
China operates on decades long plans, is it possible that if they thought that securing the entire South China sea was worth it in the long run that they would be willing to go to war over it? I see nothing that makes me thing they would not be willing to decimate Vietnam and the Philippines to do so. Would the united states be willing to go to war against China for the benefits of Vietnam or the Philippines. They have forced a million Uighur's into camps and we shrug so probably not. That would change if China went after Japan. What if the current trade war escalated to the point it was causing serious harm to China's economy, would they go to war?
A war with China would potentially be a war to end all wars (again), especially if it pulled in Russia, Japan and others. Furthermore, the victor of a war between China and the United states would lay claim to being known as the dominant power on earth, able to enforce its will to greatly enhance its economy in much the same way the US did after WW II. If China thought it could win, they would be able to essentially force their way of life on vast sections of the world. It also allows the victor to claim the moon and mars in the long term, a massive advantage in the next few decades.
We unfortunately live in a very precarious world that most of us on this site don't have to see the worst of due to the simple act of winning a geographic birth lottery.
I'm thinking that nuclear weapons will continue to preclude any large-scale direct war between the great powers. The downside is that cyber-war by both nation-states and small groups and individuals, along with civilian conflict amplified by modern social-media based divisions and filter bubbles have a lot of potential to spiral out of control, especially when further provoked by foreign interference. Particularly because nobody knows for sure how it will all work or what will happen when determined adversaries exploit all of these to the maximum potential.
It's also entirely possible we'll see some new thing as equivalently stupid, bloody, and pointless as tightly massed soldiers in brightly colored uniforms with no protection doing foot-charges against dug-in machine guns behind barbed wire and artillery.
I'm more scared about a great civil war in a powerful nuclear nation. Civil wars are a savage affair where no rules apply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
Premise: the large nations of the world are far to intertwined by commerce and culture. Large scale war would be suicidal and the leadership of these countries would never do something so foolish.
They weren't wrong
If the political vectors of the last few years remain unchanged, a large war is very likely.
Nationalism and hysteria can lead people do things that are bad for both individuals and the group. Increasing free trade between countries and globalism is a good way to try and prevent wars, but the current reversion to nationalism makes me nervous.
That is exactly what "everybody" assumed before 1914, as pointed by the article.
At some stage, a consensus must build for stopping our destruction of the climate. (Well perhaps it won't, but in that case we're doomed, so there's little point in evaluating that path).
At that point, some countries (presumably rich ones) will have cleaned their own houses emissions-wise and be signed up to assist poorer nations.
It will then become unacceptable to them that their efforts are in vain and at risk, because other countries are free riding and doing nothing, and continuing to pump emissions into the atmosphere.
Their mindset will move from pride at their own achievements to anger and frustration at others.
Soon after that will come enforcement. After all, it cannot be unreasonable to stop other countries from destroying the environment that we all share - even if those countries have to be destroyed to save the planet.
> It will then become unacceptable to them that their efforts are in vain and at risk, because other countries are free riding and doing nothing, and continuing to pump emissions into the atmosphere.
The idea of invading countries to stop carbon emissions is interesting as a thought experiment, but given how things are now, it's far more likely that most countries (including rich countries) won't make efforts to massively reduce carbon emissions until it's far too late. It may already be far too late.
Most countries aren't even interested in trying to limit emissions to their current levels which is a complete joke compared to what is actually needed to have a chance of stopping global warming (assuming it can still be stopped).
Right now it seems like science fiction that anybody will try doing anything about the climate.
So, in reality we'll probably see a failing ecosystem and the strongest military killing the rest of us.
China needing to get rid of a couple million excess men is the thing that scares me most.
I could see China throwing a couple million men into a meat grinder with India. That could easily do enough damage to India to provoke a nuclear response.
What is stopping pre-brexit UK trying to nuke EU? The EU treaties?
(Probably not. But for the sake of argument.)
Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln
War Is Merely the Continuation of Policy by Other Means"
Politicians always cause wars ... and always will. The only way we have a war over environment is when we impact a nation so they have no choice... or it has something to do with profit.
I'm going to be real pissed off if we screw this up.
No matter how much energy you capture, you can't replicate the multi-billion year process of evolution and growth in biodiversity that has led to the incredible present state of Earth.
It is pure madness to invest in colonizing other planets before we figure out how to sustain the ideal place we already inhabit.
America is just as guilty of this as anyone.
The global level of violence is dropping and overall tolerance of casualties is declining. Rising cost of human life shifts the perception of conflicts in the majority of countries. It's getting very hard to explain the necessity of even several dead bodies from local conflicts, let alone to justify a sacrifice of millions of lifes.
Related to this is the shift of global power: throughout the history the ruling class is basically military. Thus the perception of war as of something possible, profitable under right circumstances and even desirable. This mindset was carried into the 20th century when it met technological progress which made possible the horror of World Wars. Likely, it seems that it has changed, at least to some extent.
Current 'ruler of the world' is not the army, it's rather all sorts of special forces and agencies. It's hard to sell the idea of marching and dying for your king/motherland/god to the public today and thus get/take the funding required, but it's much easier to sell it the idea of security. Security is a good thing, right? So the agencies need more and more power to protect you better. Sadly, in a paradoxical way this is partly also a consequence of rising value of human life.
However, 'special forces' elite is different from a military one and it's more bound to civil oversight in regards to casualties and the acceptable scale of violence. So we see that the conflicts of today are much less bloody than they could be given the weapons we have.
Now one can argue that this only holds until the current order is not significantly destabilized, or that it can spiral into some perverted form of 'preemptive security' (like e.g. govt propaganda about the need to eliminate some threat completely and strike first and hard for the sake of 'security'). And yes, everything can happen. But thinking of probability it seems that the balance is shifting towards smaller local conflicts rather than global wars.
Only if you ignore "but you started first" nuclear war that can start even completely accidentally.
https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/past-announcements/
If you think "but everybody in charge knows what they are doing" you probably never worked in any large enough organization. We should all actively work on forcing the politicians to significantly reduce the installed nuclear resources, simply to increase the chance for humanity to survive once an accident happen, because sooner or later it will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...
This sense of increased morality was also present around WW2. German jew hatred was never a secret, yet few anticipated the scale what was coming. And even after the war it wasn't until the 70s before the horrors of the Holocaust really entered common public awareness.
Some of that perception today is a result of censorship too. While most realize China is persecuting the Falun Gong few realize it goes into a million with a significant percentage murdered. And now China seems to be doing a similar thing with Muslims, albeit no reports of mass murder yet. If we go to war with China I'm sure this information will go from relatively embargoed to an important element of justifying the conflict.
IMO, the chance of a nuclear war in any given year is about 1-2%. That's not very much for any particular year, but over a few decades...
The graph of warheads per country is basically the US, Russia and everyone else combined is a distant third.
The UK had ~200 warheads about a quarter of which are deployed at anyone time, two US ballistic missile subs fields more than that (they have 18) and then the missile silos, the cruise missiles, the gravity bombs and on and on it goes...
Once just one single nuclear bomb destroys something significant, all bets are almost surely off. So counting doesn't help, the whole domino-effect constellation is simply too dangerous. The only sustainable solution is to reduce the arsenals the orders of magnitude, if we want to increase the chances for the humanity to survive.
The right perspective is exactly the WW I: Austrian Empire just wanted its own teeny-weeny local war (just as an perspective, as late as four years ago, some Austrian historians still claimed: "Austria didn't start the WW I -- we just started the war with Serbia -- everything else was done by everybody else"). But the domino effect ensued. The result was the whole world erupting, so badly that even WW II was a kind of an effect of WW I, as the article also recognizes.
The presence of nuclear self defense is what keeps nuclear armed nations from engaging in aggressive wars with other nuclear armed nations.
The Chinese seem to be playing the long game by strategically investing in infrastructure like roads and rail across Africa, probably both for strategic advantages (given Africa's large reserves of anything from rhino horns over diamonds and uranium to rare-earth metals) and economic advantages (the US and EU markets are saturated, South America is going down rapidly, but Africa can only grow and buy Chinese products in return - basically the Marshall Plan just without the war).
Also, both China and Russia engage in cyber warfare - the Chinese right now mostly for economic espionage, the Russians at the moment for destabilizing democracy.
What worries me is the shit some Arab countries are trying to play with Israel (esp. Turkey!) and the skirmishes between India and Pakistan, as well as Pakistan's problems with terrorism. Both countries are highly volatile and hell I don't want to experience the Taliban getting hands on Pakistani nukes.
So, there are LOTS of possibilities for nuclear-armed powers to go to war, and some not even violent. The key is that no power ever actively uses nuclear weapons, but there's nothing that prevents them from using conventional ammo. There's enough of that alone to blow the planet to pieces.
There is a key difference between the Marshall Plan and China's modern African investment. The Marshall Plan was pretty emphatically a plan to help coerce Western Europe into supporting what effectively became the West, and combined vigorous restoration efforts with criterion for supporting certain kinds of economic reforms. In particular, it was very much meant to build up Europe not so that it served as a market for American goods but rather so that Europe could be useful junior partners in a coalition. China's current investment hews much closer to neocolonialism: it's building African infrastructure, but managed by Chinese, owned by Chinese, and even built by Chinese imported for the labor. It is not engendering local goodwill for China, and unlike the Marshall Plan, it isn't helping move these countries into China's camp in a putative global war.
China doesn't need African foot soldiers to burn away in the trenches, there are enough Chinese people to serve as cannon fodder. Sounds harsh but that's the ultimate advantage of China compared to any other military except maybe India's.
What the Chinese are doing actually is to ensure they control the world's reserves of uranium and rare-earth metals. Or, if they don't control it or the governments by puppet/bought governments directly, then by extortion a la "you give the West their uranium, we grind your economy to a halt". Or, by controlling the shipping ports in the sea countries of Africa so that resources from the landlocked countries cannot be exported, or at least the transport cost rises.
The latter strategy they are also pursuing in central Europe - they bought, for example, the port of Piraeus via Cosco.
Whoever crosses their path can be ground to pieces if the Chinese wish so. The West is too f...ing dependent on China and that's gonna bite us in our behinds.
Anyway, MAD has very nearly failed on several occasions -- Cuban Missile Crisis, false alarms, etc.
Rising nationalism and games of "chicken" don't mix well.
[0]: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a23074/cuban-missi...
If a war had occurred, the US would have suffered enormously, but it would have come out of the conflict largely intact. Think the “get our hair mussed” bit from Dr. Strangelove.
The Crisis just shows that war can be avoided even when one side has a huge advantage, if neither side really wants it.
India and Pakistan fought a war in 1999, despite both having sizable nuclear arsenals (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kargil_War). The risk of escalation kept the scale of the fighting limited, but it didn't prevent the war altogether.
Be careful with extrapolation. People said the same thing about the USSR, Japan, and the EU.
Sure the US won't be as dominant as they are now forever, but extrapolating China's growth from a very poor developing country to their current level and assuming that means that they might make some kind of leap that allows them to take over the world is going too far.
I would like to hope that they hit the breaks in the same way that Japan did, and there's certainly plenty of evidence that it's possible. However, if their model remains viable and they continue growing at the same rate, they'll certainly eclipse us in political and economic influence in 10-20 years at most - potentially technologically as well. I'm not sure that's even a disputable claim - it should be self evident. The question is if we'll suddenly outperform or if they'll hit a stumbling block, which remains to be seen.
1) Mutually assured destruction.
2) No major empires dissolving.
3) Global news keeps everyone on the same page as crises unfold.
4) World powers separated by vast seas, neutral countries, and demilitarized zones.
5) The UN exists (not always effective, but at least it's there).
6) Less chauvinism. Kaiser Wilhelm II makes Trump look diplomatic and cordial in comparison.
Have you watched Russian news? Or Fox?
> World powers separated by vast seas, neutral countries, and demilitarized zones.
That's just not true. Where was the demilitarized zone or neutral country between Ukraine and Russia?
> Less chauvinism. Kaiser Wilhelm II makes Trump look diplomatic and cordial in comparison.
I somewhat doubt that. Again, you've heard of Putin?
The world is way beyond what can be survived in terms of flat out war.
It's not really something I worry about. People just want to eat McD and earn a high salary. Nobody in the powerful nations is eager to get shot (well US military complex aside).
Aside from this rather endearing naivete, the gist of the article is fine: we need to fear another 'Great War'.
Modern warfare grants (perceived) first-strike capability to almost any state, rendering the power of MAD and military alliances close to negligible. We live in the 21st century now, things are different than before, and highly dangerous as long as states put their self-interest above our common global destiny, as is the attitude du jour.
People behave as if nothing bad can happen, it's highly frustrating to watch.
That is folly. The idea of MAD is that you have second-strike capabilities that are sufficiently hardened that no first-strike attack is capable of preventing the second-strike retaliation from occurring. In essence, the idea is that the calculus becomes "if we go to war, the only outcome is that we both lose."
Are you implying you can destroy the enemy's nuclear arsenal in your first strike? If so, you don't understand MAD. Any submarine arsenal will be nearly impossible to destroy. If you first strike North Dakota (for example) to destroy all the missile silos, subs will simply eradicate your country.
A single submarine cannot be trivially located - the ocean is too deep and vast. If countries working together can't find the wreckage of a single crashed airplane in a generally known location, how do you expect them to find dozens of cloaked subs in unknown locations each holding hundreds of nuclear warheads?
Even assuming you wipe out 100% of the continental USA's weapons with a first strike, there are still thousands of nukes in the ocean ready to wipe your country off the face of the earth.
How does this fit in with your original argument that first strikes "render the power of MAD and military alliances close to negligible"?
What are you talking about? Only 9 states have nuclear weapons. Of them, only 5 have any significant number.
That all being said, I'm not saying it's impossible, but that we're so connected now that I just don't see a great war because too many of our soldiers will have brothers, sisters, best friends in the war we're going up against.
Wars happen because in a set of animals, one member or subset will want the control of, say, the resources of an area, mating rights within the group, etc. Its members will often think that it's acting this way as a form of public service. "Someone has to divide up the meat of the fallen antelope," for example, ignoring what happens with control which is that the spoils, the resources, etc. will start to divide unevenly.
This continues to the point of extreme imbalance, such as just before the French Revolution where the wealthy paid less in tax than the poor, or the leader becomes too weak to maintain control. In all cases, control isn't maintained for long.
Right now, America is the empire in control. The problem that I see is that its generals are preparing for the last war with battleships and big guns (as sort of an "innovator's dilemma", where what has been successful for a company maintains the limelight despite a growing new reality). You can see the control ebbing, weakening. The petrodollar, for example, once so strong and a big part of the country's economic power, is now being replaced with the Special Drawing Right (SDR) -- a diversified basket of currencies.
And that's' the only solution: to diversify control. The peace that's found when an empire has control is temporary; it's the eye of the storm. Until there's world-wide democracy, we will have war.
I used to think that, but then I realised that the Internet is mostly just a porn-delivery device.
Plus, there's the 4-chan factor, as in: if there is going to be another world war, it'll start because of something someone posted on 4-chan ... I mean look how easily the Internet was usurped to provide the "but Russia!" narrative, eagerly embraced by many a hawk as a means to a violent end ..
Have they resolved the calls to retract or strengthen the evidence supporting their apple/amazon hardware hack story?
Now a story about "the next great war"?
A lot of fear mongering it seems. What is bloomberg's agenda in doing that?
"As Americans consider how strongly — or even whether — to defend the international order their country created against the growing pressures exerted by authoritarian revisionist powers such as China and Russia, this lesson is worth keeping in mind."
Basically, the author argues: "the Americans" should not stop to "to defend the international order" "against" "China and Russia" or... there can be a new World War.
Note the problem: it is not clear how the author imagines that the very insisting on "defending" the "order" by the Americans can't provoke the bigger war than they imagine?
Austrian leaders, at that moment of a huge empire, also just believed they "defended" the "order" when attacking Serbia, which they expected will be a small and easy war, but they actually started the WW I. In spite of the popular belief, also mentioned in the article that "what we would now call globalization had rendered great-power conflict obsolete."
For example all the noise about Russia's influence in US election, seemed to me the media was trying to ultimately instigate war.
The supply chain of American (and most modern countries) isn't fortified against any sort of large-scale attack. It wouldn't take much to know out food, fuel, and power supplies for most Americans. Once that happens, a little bit of propaganda will incite major riots which require police intervention.
There are enough "militias" in the country waiting patiently for their time to rise up. Should they decide to "protect" themselves from the "looters," the country's leadership will probably have to redirect their attention an resources homeward in order to stabilize their power.
That alone is enough to set the country back several decades. Especially if the educated class seeks refuge in a more stable, foreign country. Like what happened in central Europe after WWII.
The future of warfare is against world powers is probably a long-term sequence of small scale attacks of this nature. Disrupt supplies, push propaganda, and create power vacuums which need to be filled.
Aerial bombing was an Italian innovation, during their war in Lybia
"Revisionist" in what sense?
I'm not being jingoistic, and am very cynical about US intentions, practices and policies, but the reality is that without US military hegemony, countries that fought for resources, like on the NEP, might again.
I'm not saying the US is _good_ because they prop up free trade. It's just empire 2.0, not some altruistic quest on the US's part.