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I think you’re mostly right. One thing about “nation building” though is that the US has only been successful (broadly defined) when we occupy the country completely, like a colony, for a generation and essentially administer their government for them for a long time. Now, there’s obviously a lot of warts involved in doing that but Germany, Japan, and South Korea are the last times we really went “all in” (South Korea is a much more murky example as you’ve pointed out). To be clear, Iraq and Afghanistan are very different for reasons that should be obvious (OEF 12-13, here), and while I’m not saying that treating those places like a colony would’ve worked better (I don’t think it would have, for enough reasons to fill a PhD thesis) it’s an interesting historical thought experiment.

Back to the actual topic, I share the skepticism of tech Uber alles expressed like others, and trying to predict the future of warfare is mostly a futile exercise. Probably best to index on flexibility and tight training regimens and make some informed inferences about how to structure the force.

Another major difference between nation-building in Germany post-WW2 and nation-building in Iraq post-Saddam was that the occupying forces (mostly the Americans) left most of the Nazis in place (with a few notable exceptions at the top), while in Iraq almost the entire Baath Party structure was obliterated.

One of my favourite examples is Hans Speidel [1], a Wehrmacht lieutenant-general by the time the war ended, who got to be "Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Land Forces Central Europe from 1957 to 1963", plus the major shareholder of Mercedes in the 1960s who had been a big Nazi sympathiser during the war (his name escapes me right now, and I can't google him easily, the official Mercedes history does not mention him), to say northing of how the infamous IG Farben was split between BASF and Bayer (among others), and not immediately raised to the ground and liquidated. I don't think the Americans that occupied Iraq in 2003 were as friendly with the company that stood behind Saddam's chemical attacks against the Kurds in the 1980s.

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

Fanta also has an interesting history: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fanta-soda-origins-naz...

Also overlooked in the post WWII analysis (apart from historians) is the influence of the Adenauer government: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaftswunder

There’s a great book called “the shortest history of Germany” that covers it nicely. It’s fascinating. This type of government action (included devaluation of citizens money but allowing companies to retain their value, cheap, highly motivated and educated labour force) likely had a much great impact than the Marshall Plan which is what you always hear about today. The book also goes into details on how the border of the Roman world still today predicts the richest regions of Germany, and created a split in the East/West “world”.

> There’s a great book called “the shortest history of Germany” that covers it nicely. It’s fascinating.

Do you happen to have an easy link to it? Sounds really interesting.

> The book also goes into details on how the border of the Roman world still today predicts the richest regions of Germany

Just a couple of hours ago I was looking for a .kml or .geojson file of the Roman "limes", I was trying to prove its relationship to some toponymy-data from the Carpathians. It's crazy how influential the Romans were.

Sure, its this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34757960-the-shortest-hi...

Thank you, my pet peeve is how the entire Iraqi Army was fired. Was it morally the right thing to do, even considering ISIS was basically boosted from obscurity to a decades long pain in the ass from that move alone?

According to the wikipedia article you link to, your summary of Spiedel's life misses an important point. I think the US did recruit Iraqi defectors.

> Speidel joined the German Army in 1914, fought in the First World War, and stayed with the Army as a career soldier after the war. He served as chief of staff to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel during the Second World War and was promoted to lieutenant general in 1944. Speidel participated in the 20 July Plot to assassinate Hitler, and he was tasked with recruiting Rommel for the resistance. After the plot failed he was arrested by the Gestapo. At the end of the war, he escaped from Nazi prison and went into hiding. He was the only major member of the 20 July Plot to survive the war.

I saw that, but by July 1944 the Wehrmacht had been directly responsible for millions of civilian deaths on the Eastern Front (less so in the West because the Allies had just landed in Normandy), this guy (and his other coup colleagues) were just unlucky because they went for the king and missed him. That doesn't absolve any of them of the war's atrocities of which the institution they worked for was directly responsible (among many others in the Nazi regime, of course).

I agree he's morally reprehensible. I was just saying that similar people in Iraq (Iraqis who participated in the Iraqi govt while it committed war crimes) who defected were treated similarly.

> The last real success was South Korea.

Haha. Nation building involves a boatload of money and the US post war policy was essentially to own the governments of the rebuilt nations. SK, JP are good examples of this and have modeled their development goals to mirror American way of life. From small things like TV shows (to non americans JPN and SK television is as obnoxious as US television with everything being over the top and colourful.) To much broader economic policy.

Be that as it may, the big countries generally dont fight each other because the losses on both sides will be massive but other than the US the other countries generally dont mess with smaller countries unless it has an immediate political outcome eg. Russia and ukraine.

Miltary history can teach all of us a lot but its inportant to take it with a shovel of salt. Victors write the books and rarely do they write about shortcomings. War is a terrible mess and almost entirely dependent on allies.

Lastly I would like to point out our naivete if we think a whole state will stand and wait for a belligerent nation to invade them in their father's ancestral land. The scars of war tend to fester. Should the big countries go to war, the outcome will not be anything like we hope or predict.

> From small things like TV shows (to non americans JPN and SK television is as obnoxious as US television with everything being over the top and colourful.)

You take this evidence that japanese and south korean television shows consciously try to imitate the US? Maybe that's just what most people like?

well are europeans show likewise ?

Much of european TV is like the most awful american TV. For example there's some kind of equivalent of the daily show in almost every european country. But that's not because the US forces it on europe, it's just what people like.

Indeed. US seems to be the primary distributor of what we can call "universal culture" - i.e. the things that culturally outcompete other things. It's not even that the US has the best cultural ideas - but being the strongest and relatively free market economy for most of the 20th century let the US import ideas from all around the world, distill them through market competition, and re-export globally as "American".

Indeed, the US pursued cultural export to Europe and Asia very aggressively, as a deliberate, planned policy [3] after the war. E.g. the Marshall plan granted convenient access to American film, pop music, and later on television to the Western European market [1] [2]. After the US built a huge culture industry, it was much easier to maintain momentum.

[1] https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/9701

[2] The World Audience for America's Story, US Advisory Commission on Information, 1949

[3] Coca-colonization and the Cold War, R. Wagnleitner, 1991

Good points. I think you’re right about the importance of being able to fight near peers.

> If you buy the second theory, then the major reason there is no war between the US and China or Russia is because they don't believe they can win (which is probably true, as long as the US doesn't try to invade).

There’s also the issue that even for the winner, a war is probably net negative for its people.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231748269_Rationali... has interesting reasoning on how we can still get war even if states would prefer not to.

>Also, I don't really see much evidence that the US has ever really been successful at nation building

Compare West Germany to the GDR. Japan turned out absolutely amazing all things considered.

But they had national identities before we were there. Iraq has 10,000yr of cultural baggage that needs mopping up. Afghanistan is only really a "nation" in the sense that the land isn't controlled by any of the neighboring countries. I'm not sure where Vietnam stands. I think Korea is the only "success against the odds" story.

> Iraq has 10,000yr of cultural baggage that needs mopping up.

I would disagree that it was cultural baggage and not massive mismanagement of the post invasion landscape by the US. After the invasion, that absolutely crucial mistake made was to not have any plan on how to provide security in the immediate aftermath of the complete toppling of a foreign government.

CENTCOM, the Army War College, and the Army Chief of Staff, among others, warned that we needed a robust plan for security. These were ignored by civilian leadership and the Pentagon, so there was no real “Phase 4” post invasion plan. Policing the streets, securing weapons depots, tracking down loyalists, etc. was just not planned for and as a result, the country slipped into chaos. It is estimated that there were no more than about 5,000 fanatical loyalists post invasion, with almost everyone else being undecided and just seeing what would happen. The mass unemployment of security and military forces pushed a lot of them into the insurgency out of anger and the need for a job. The widespread looting, crime waves, and resulting economic stagnation destroyed the goodwill the US could have had for freeing people from a blood thirsty dictator.

All these things allowed for an insurgency to grow, harden, and fill its ranks with military trained fighters that would fight for the next 5 years. The chaos and lack of security allowed for jihadists like Al Qaeda to move in and take advantage, eventually splitting off into Al Qaeda in Iraq and pushing the country to the brink of civil war. It wouldn’t have been easy, regardless of the plan, but the failure of Iraq was 100% foreseeable and avoidable.

It would have been nice if we didn't do a bad job but my point is that a "good job" still isn't gonna come out looking like Japan. The national unity isn't there.

I know everyone wants to write wall of text rants about everything that went wrong in Iraq and there's more than enough content there to do that but my point is that if you take a step back from the detailed specifics of how we went about nation building it becomes clear that even a "win" doesn't look all that pretty.

Compare West Germany to American Occupation Zone.

The nation building was based on starving people to death and destroying any industry as well as R&D capability. It took years of "boots on the ground" reporting about growing discontent because soviet occupation zone "at least had food" till the west german efforts for independent country were accepted, with very strong shackles. And a lot of it was for a proxy war with another empire.

I think we need a third theory of conflict: political-religious extremism/propaganda/brainwashing.

Islamist terrorists and white supremacist terrorists derive some motivation (but not all) from their indoctrination. If the Quran and the Hadiths were a much more tame and apolitical document then we wouldn't get the extent and mode of fighting that we experience now.

Japan in WW2 fits into this third theory of conflict as well. Yes it was partly fear of the Soviets, partly resentment (and fear of missing out) over European colonialism, but the rabid belief in nationalism and race superiority was also a big causal factor as well. Their reasons for advancing so aggressively into China and South Asia have nothing to do with oppression and nothing to do with a rational theory of conflict. Many thought the war with US was impossible to win, their industrial production capacity was 1/20th that of the US for instance. Pearl Harbor was a suicidal all-in motivated by them running out of oil combined with their inability to surrender (rabid nationalism).

Very often these human drivers related to cognitive bias, fanatic belief, tribalism, are at the root.

> If the Quran and the Hadiths were a much more tame and apolitical document then we wouldn't get the extent and mode of fighting that we experience now.

I think this is a mistake and is not backed up by history. Christian Europe warred for hundreds of years, often using religious doctrine as justification. But the reality is that these conflicts were struggles for resources, power grabs by heads of state, instability created by power vacuums, incompetent leaders, ect. The exact flavor of each conflict was influenced by the religion, but fertile soil for conflict was very terrestrial causes.

The Middle East had long periods of stability. It is only in the 100 years in the post WWI landscape, where the longstanding empire collapsed, European interests carved up the region with little regard, and installed puppet regimes that were often specifically tied to ethnic or religious differences. This created the fertile ground for conflict, revolution, and oppressive regimes. Since many of the puppet governments were ethnic or religious minorities only ratcheted up those aspects in the future conflicts, and it is exactly what we see now.

The idea that Islam is just destined to be violent and chaotic is just as misguided as seeing Middle Ages Europe, reading Jesus’s “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword”, and saying the same thing about Christianity.

> The idea that Islam is just destined to be violent and chaotic

I agree with you on this point, and this isn't my claim. My only claim is that the doctrine plays some non-trivial causal role in the entire picture, in that it provides motive in addition to the geopolitical context. I also agree with you that without the spark of geopolitical circumstance, the doctrine itself may not be a sufficient condition for war/terrorism etc. It does however acts as a significant magnifier.

Consider this thought experiment: If the Quran (or Bible for that matter) were instead absolute pacifistic in stance: explicitly condemning all political violence and terrorism, all war except that which is strictly defensive, and explicitly outlines a delineation between doctrine & state -- would we see more or less conflict, war, terrorism, etc?

These are not impotent documents that play zero role in motivating (or at least, failing to attenuate) specific behavior as a direct outcome of the prescriptions outlined in the text. To an extent they're used as a post hoc justification, but they also play a motivating role (especially if we take the words of Islamist terrorists at face value).

We have evidence of this causal role (doctrine to behavior) by looking at governance in some Muslim majority countries that adopt Sharia, e.g. in Iran. Without this specific doctrine, their system of governance would in a literal sense be entirely different. If the Quran prescribes that the state should be secular, I believe that would have had quite a large causal impact on the Arabic world.

Another example of the causal role of doctrine was when Christians cherry-picked parts of the bible in support of slavery. If the Bible was less self-contradictory in this instance, it's easy to see that it would've been easier to eliminate slavery faster than it happened.

It's also interesting that the only time that the doctrine to action causal path is contested is in the cast of Islamist terrorism. Why does this get contested but everyone accepts a causal role when it comes to white supremacist terrorism, Japanese motives in WW2, and Nazi motives in WW2 (partly driven by anti-semitic beliefs/propaganda, in addition to the more pragmatic Lebensraum motive and a wounded national ego after Treaty of Versailles & WW1 loss)?

> To an extent they're used as a post hoc justification, but they also play a motivating role (especially if we take the words of Islamist terrorists at face value).

Absolutely. But that is what I was saying, that religion determines the exact flavor of conflict, but the root causes are rarely religious. If it was different (if the Middle East was Christian and Europe was Muslim for instance) the Middle Ages would have still been a violent chaotic time for Europe, and the Middle East would have still been a violent chaotic time after WWI.

> It's also interesting that the only time that the doctrine to action causal path is contested is in the cast of Islamist terrorism

I think largely it is because it is so often been used (especially in the post 9/11 era) as a shoulder shrug “well that’s just how Muslims are” excuse. In this very thread, people have said that the post invasion Iraqi chaos was due to “10,000yr of cultural baggage that needs mopping up” when it was directly a result of the US failing to have any plan for post invasion security after collapsing the government. The picture is often painted that these issues in the Middle East are unsolvable because it’s all because of Islam and they have been fighting for 1,000 years and that’s not going to change. To use your Nazi example, it would be like looking at Germany during WWII and saying “well they are religious anti Semites. That’s why they fight and they will always fight and we can’t change their religious beliefs so that’s just the way it is.”

Of course I know you aren’t saying this, but enough people are that I feel it needs to be contextualized. How people understand the situation in the Middle East effects what strategies we support in dealing with the Middle East. If people keep believing that the situation is caused by religion (something we cannot change) instead of economic instability, proxy conflict by regional and global powers, power vacuums from collapsing dictatorships, etc., then it will continue to hamper our foreign policy. Even terrorism is primarily a small number of globally focused jihadists infecting and coopting local causes and grievances.

> Another example of the causal role of doctrine was when Christians cherry-picked parts of the bible in support of slavery. If the Bible was less self-contradictory in this instance, it's easy to see that it would've been easier to eliminate slavery faster than it happened.

Even this I think is overblown in its influence. Many Christian countries gave up enslaved Africans much easier than the US. If the Bible was silent on slavery, I think it would have still gone very similarly for the US. Slavery was propping up the plantation based economy of the southern States, the 3/5th voting rules allowed for the less populated southern states to have outsized electoral power compared to the northern states, and the rapid expansion West (and the proposed rules on slavery for incoming states) threatened to upset that Southern power. In other words, I think people put too much stock in religious justifications, when underlying structural reasons are often what really shape things.

I don't think we disagree on all that much.

> the root causes are rarely religious

I can agree with this, but I believe my point stands that the specific contents of the doctrine can act as a significant magnifier when the additional geopolitical context is in place.

Nationalism and belief in racial superiority in Japan (especially among the military which basically ran the show given a lack of oversight or control by representatives) played a huge causal role in their actions. I would go so far as to say it was a necessary but not sufficient condition for what occurred in the Eastern theatre of WW2.

Regarding religion, if the Bible & Quran were explicitly pacifistic and forbade war (instead of glorifying it in certain instances), I believe the world would look quite different. If we accept this, then we accept that the specific contents of the doctrine do play an important causal role. Is it plausible to see Jain individuals becoming terrorists in support of a political objective? It seems rather dubious that that would happen.

> The idea that Islam is just destined to be violent and chaotic is just as misguided as seeing Middle Ages Europe, reading Jesus’s “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword”, and saying the same thing about Christianity.

It is well known that any culture where polygyny is the norm will be more violent than a similar culture where the norm is monogamy.