A naive interpretation would be that whoever owns a gun holds political power. In a country where the entire population is armed, ‘the people’ can exert violence and therefore ‘the people’ are in power
To be fair, this is truer than a lot of us will admit. “The government wants something that the people, or a meaningful faction thereof, really, really do not want” looks a lot different in armed-to-the-teeth America than it does in France, even as populist-intellectual influencers on either side of the aisle cite the aesthetics of French protests as evidence of a more vital people. This is true even with the moderating influence of federalism, which causes the most agentic and ideological Americans to move to places where they’re among friends and therefore unlikely to cause as much trouble for their neighbors.
A startling amount of the laissez faire governance we take for granted exists because, in the calculations of those in charge, a sufficiently antagonistic action could lead to individuals or small groups imposing much more meaningful consequences than they would otherwise be able to. Long right tails emerge when calculating the expected cost of enforcing unpopular laws.
Despite its vast territory, Russia’s economy is smaller than Italy’s
I’m surprised to see someone still saying this. GDP isn’t a fungible mass that can equate to war production, and, to my understanding, most of the people who had assumed this at the start of the war have since disavowed the position. We’re years out from the war’s start, and even with the entire EU making it an extremely high priority, military equipment production is substantially outpaced by Russia. Even America, with its world-dominating military budget and a president that has made military reindustrialization a major spending point for his political capital, has had trouble keeping up.
The respective fates of the American and Russian hypersonic missile programs is fairly telling. The Russians spent a lot less and got there first, but the American program certainly translated to a much bigger ‘addition’ to GDP in the process of getting there second. The adoption of what looks very much like a Geran-II as their next generation drone indicates that the American procurement program has learned at least a little bit of this harsh lesson, and might be better-positioned in the future, but it strikes me as well-proven that you cannot easily hammer spreadsheets into artillery shells. The experiment’s been run.
In regard to the conclusion itself, I think internal political pressures will impact the EU’s ability to act as a military power more than the structure of the army will. In historical examples cited, there were major demarcations in the relative politics of fit, fighting-aged males, and a substantial number of government-supporters could always be found among that group. In Europe, the young, the male, and those inclined towards fighting generally skew very anti-establishment, to the point where I don’t think that a national or international military composed of them could reliably be applied in service of internal political goals.
I expect that NATO’s intended strategy in a major conflict is to recruit its soldiers from Poland, if Ukraine can’t or won’t provide enough men already, with the other member states continuing to provide money and material in lieu of troops. The political situation is already tenuous, and conscription brings a lot of discontented young men off the sidelines, since they’re already being asked to risk their lives fighting someone.
To be fair, this is truer than a lot of us will admit. “The government wants something that the people, or a meaningful faction thereof, really, really do not want” looks a lot different in armed-to-the-teeth America than it does in France, even as populist-intellectual influencers on either side of the aisle cite the aesthetics of French protests as evidence of a more vital people. This is true even with the moderating influence of federalism, which causes the most agentic and ideological Americans to move to places where they’re among friends and therefore unlikely to cause as much trouble for their neighbors.
A startling amount of the laissez faire governance we take for granted exists because, in the calculations of those in charge, a sufficiently antagonistic action could lead to individuals or small groups imposing much more meaningful consequences than they would otherwise be able to. Long right tails emerge when calculating the expected cost of enforcing unpopular laws.
I’m surprised to see someone still saying this. GDP isn’t a fungible mass that can equate to war production, and, to my understanding, most of the people who had assumed this at the start of the war have since disavowed the position. We’re years out from the war’s start, and even with the entire EU making it an extremely high priority, military equipment production is substantially outpaced by Russia. Even America, with its world-dominating military budget and a president that has made military reindustrialization a major spending point for his political capital, has had trouble keeping up.
The respective fates of the American and Russian hypersonic missile programs is fairly telling. The Russians spent a lot less and got there first, but the American program certainly translated to a much bigger ‘addition’ to GDP in the process of getting there second. The adoption of what looks very much like a Geran-II as their next generation drone indicates that the American procurement program has learned at least a little bit of this harsh lesson, and might be better-positioned in the future, but it strikes me as well-proven that you cannot easily hammer spreadsheets into artillery shells. The experiment’s been run.
In regard to the conclusion itself, I think internal political pressures will impact the EU’s ability to act as a military power more than the structure of the army will. In historical examples cited, there were major demarcations in the relative politics of fit, fighting-aged males, and a substantial number of government-supporters could always be found among that group. In Europe, the young, the male, and those inclined towards fighting generally skew very anti-establishment, to the point where I don’t think that a national or international military composed of them could reliably be applied in service of internal political goals.
I expect that NATO’s intended strategy in a major conflict is to recruit its soldiers from Poland, if Ukraine can’t or won’t provide enough men already, with the other member states continuing to provide money and material in lieu of troops. The political situation is already tenuous, and conscription brings a lot of discontented young men off the sidelines, since they’re already being asked to risk their lives fighting someone.