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>We already have armies at the country level I say the following as a former officer in the French army, which I'm sure you'll agree is one of the more active

>We already have armies at the country level I say the following as a former officer in the French army, which I'm sure you'll agree is one of the more active armies in the EU. We nominally have country-level armies. Their funding is consistently reduced and their numbers regularly downsized, and this trend exists across Europe. One might nitpick by pointing to specific budget increases, but the trend is undeniable if you look at it on any reasonable time-scale. I can think of no European country that has an autonomous standing army, capable of deploying itself to the theater of operations, resupplying and sustaining combat efforts without the support of US logistics. To point at the mere existence of national armies is to play word games. The EU members have outsourced their defense to the United States, and are now paying the price. EDIT: to be clear, I am quite skeptical of an EU strategic command.

pasabagi 5y ago
The reason is simple: you need extensive logistics support for expeditionary warfare. European states are not really structurally placed to engage in this kind of thing: ever since the Suez crisis, it's been obvious that we basically live in an US world order, and doing expeditionary stuff without the American's say-so is a bad idea. So, since you're going to need American permission anyway, you may as well plan on relying on their capabilities.
- omginternets 5y ago
  Ignoring the fact that the Suez crisis was largely a turning point for the English, your argument is circular. The entire point is that we need to re-invest in these capabilities to some degree.
  - pasabagi 5y ago
    > your argument is circular. How so? The Suez invasion didn't fail because the British (or the French) didn't have the logistics to supply their forces. It failed because the US wasn't OK with it happening. The point is, France could build whatever expeditionary force it could fit within its national budget, and it would still be completely useless for national strategic interests, because you could only really use it if the Americans agree you could use it. Thus, it would just end up doing stuff that fits in with American strategic imperatives.
    - toyg 5y ago
      The French do have an expeditionary force, and they are not even shy about using it - they deploy to African states as a matter of routine, in practice, without any US involvement or say in the matter (afaik). But it has become increasingly clear that effective conventional warfare is now reserved, in practice, to superpowers - and even them have trouble with it, as seen in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine - because of the scale of the challenge.
      - pasabagi 5y ago
        > The French do have an expeditionary force, and they are not even shy about using it - they deploy to African states as a matter of routine, Yeah, I was kind of glossing that over. I don't know if French military involvement in Africa has been particularly helpful to France, and it seems less likely still that it has been helpful to Africans (with a few exceptions, Jean-Bedel Bokassa comes to mind). I think you're underselling the effectiveness: there have been many post-colonial interventions by european forces that have ended in the european's favour. Sri Lanka's genocidal suppression of the Tamils, for example, or the propping up of Bahrain. The broader point is, at no point do these actions run against US interests.
        toyg 5y ago
        > I don't know if French military involvement in Africa has been particularly helpful to France A number of African countries continue to store their reserves in France and work with the CFA Franc, which makes it worth it. > there have been many post-colonial interventions by european forces that have ended in the european's favour Yeah, but they are all in the past. It's today's news that the French failed in Mali. The combination of increasingly-difficult asymmetrical warfare (with guerrilla becoming more and more effective) and practical cuts to national budgets make such interventions increasingly ineffective. If even the superpowers cannot pacify medium-sized nation-states anymore, individual states have no realistic chance to achieve anything alone.
        nradov 5y ago
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  It is precisely the decades after decades resignation to "US number 1" that maintains this status quo! There is no inherent weakness of Europe. It has far more people than the US. All that welfare state makes it far more efficient too in many matters. A little "Military Keynesianism" would, frankly, be really good for solving Europe's problems of higher unemployement and whatnot too. I am generally against such things, but the welfare states make the risk of runway jobs guarantees and military industrial complexes less bad. In general, Europe missed out on Keynesianism it seems (the military or non military varieties). 70+ years of welfware states is being undone by stupid austerity. They figure out how to be good to the poor (unlike US) and not do austerity (like the US, despite what you may think), and they should leap ahaed of us. The "US-lead world order" is Europe's choice.
  - pasabagi 5y ago
    If you look at GDP charts, the US is very dynamic in comparison to the EU. I think the EU is a better model, but when it comes to raw economic, military and diplomatic power, there's no comparison. If you go back to the decades in which the US became the world hegemon (post-war era) the difference is way more stark. It's not that the EU resigned - it's that the US muscled them out!
    - oblio 5y ago
      Europe was rebuilding after WW2 and it only started presenting a somewhat united front 30 years ago. The EU is barely a confederation, let alone a federal state.
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      But that is precisely because a lack of autonomous spending in the EU! One theory is that in Europe in the 1980s, workers became so much more empowered that the private sector lost the will to invest. Start with https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf for the basic concept here, but there are many more examples. A VAT-funded balanced budget welfare state is a purely redistributional mechanism which, while great, is not sufficient to undo this sort of thing. Direct government spending like the military sort is a way around this. Maybe the workers are militant, but will the democracy just allow itself to decline military because you don't feel like dealing with that? Workers vote too, so I don't think so.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jltsiren 5y ago
> I can think of no European country that has an autonomous standing army, capable of deploying itself to the theater of operations That has been intentional. Deploying forces outside your borders is what empires do. It's out of scope for the military forces of ordinary countries. Most military forces only exist to defend their own territory. For most West European countries in the past 20-25 years, the only realistic threats were their neighbors and the US. Because all of those were allies, the primary purpose of the military was maintaining the readiness to scale up in case the world becomes more dangerous again. It will be interesting to see what will become of Europe now that Germany has decided they are allowed to act like an empire once again.
- phicoh 5y ago
  What have seen since WWII is that military attacks are extremely hard. Just about all successful missions have support of the local population in the attacked countries. Yes, the US can take over countries like Iraq or Afghanistan. And then what? Is there any net gain for the US? On the other hand, NATO bombings in former Yoguslavia led to a situation that is still more or less stable today. Russia quickly took over Crimea, which has strategic value and has support of the local population. But now they are stuck with a nasty and costly war in Ukraine. So it is not clear where in the world Germany would play 'empire'. I wonder to what extend an army can maintain an effective defence if there no need for any defence for many decades. Many western European countries have not been attacked since the end of WWII.
kodah 5y ago
The FFL is quite independent in terms of logistics, no? They recruit right out of my alma mater, the US Marines. What you're describing is taught to us as the difference between an occupying force and an expeditionary force. Occupying forces don't really need to be trained on seizing forward air bases because someone else does that. That kind of army functions a lot more like well-armed police. The Marines has a different decree, which holds most units at a high level of unit readiness because the president has the capacity to deploy them for 30 days at any given time. We operated most battlefield functions as internal jobs, aside from ships logistics, and cross-training is heavily emphasized to combat cost. Interestingly enough, the Marines is the smallest and least funded branch in the armed forces - so it would appear the difference is primarily in culture, logistics, and tactics. Edit: All this said, we operated and trained with British, Korean, Aussie, and Dutch military components that had and trained on these capabilities.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  > cross-training is heavily emphasized to combat cost. Could you unpack that? I don’t know what you mean, but it sounds interesting.
  - gnu8 5y ago
    The USMC works hard on cross-training to reduce costs, meaning that they can go out and complete short term objectives using fewer guys than other groups might need.
    - kodah 5y ago
      Just to build on this a little: My MOS was a 2844, which was a Ground Radio Technician. I could repair and operate every radio the USMC had at an advanced level. I then received courses on how to provide EMT-level care on the battlefield, machine gunners school, vehicle operations (command, gunning, operation, egress, maneuvers), basic generator troubleshooting, vehicle maintenance training, artillery/medevac coordination, advanced SatComm training, etc... This is specifically so that teams are a) self-sustaining (one team can accomplish many jobs outside of their primary job) and b) to reduce the number of on-hand resources the USMC requires to function.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
There are lots of Americans who agree with you and would LOVE to see Europe get better at this stuff and take a load off of our national expenses and bank accounts :) .
- phicoh 5y ago
  The US has a big military-industrial complex. A capable EU-army might result in a focus on weapon production in the EU. Quite a loss for US industries.
- orwin 5y ago
  You're probably wrong on the effects though. I don't see the us defense contractors and arm producer accepting that much of a cut in their budgets. Also, an unified eu defense force would undercut a lot of military contracts between EU state and us companies, and the loss of customer in this market is quite hard to offset
sofixa 5y ago
I'm not entirely certain, but it seems that French operations in Mali were done with some German and British logistic help ( but nothing France doesn't have), and the US didn't participate.

pasabagi 5y ago

The reason is simple: you need extensive logistics support for expeditionary warfare. European states are not really structurally placed to engage in this kind of thing: ever since the Suez crisis, it's been obvious that we basically live in an US world order, and doing expeditionary stuff without the American's say-so is a bad idea. So, since you're going to need American permission anyway, you may as well plan on relying on their capabilities.

omginternets 5y ago
Ignoring the fact that the Suez crisis was largely a turning point for the English, your argument is circular. The entire point is that we need to re-invest in these capabilities to some degree.
- pasabagi 5y ago
  > your argument is circular. How so? The Suez invasion didn't fail because the British (or the French) didn't have the logistics to supply their forces. It failed because the US wasn't OK with it happening. The point is, France could build whatever expeditionary force it could fit within its national budget, and it would still be completely useless for national strategic interests, because you could only really use it if the Americans agree you could use it. Thus, it would just end up doing stuff that fits in with American strategic imperatives.
  - toyg 5y ago
    The French do have an expeditionary force, and they are not even shy about using it - they deploy to African states as a matter of routine, in practice, without any US involvement or say in the matter (afaik). But it has become increasingly clear that effective conventional warfare is now reserved, in practice, to superpowers - and even them have trouble with it, as seen in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine - because of the scale of the challenge.
    - pasabagi 5y ago
      > The French do have an expeditionary force, and they are not even shy about using it - they deploy to African states as a matter of routine, Yeah, I was kind of glossing that over. I don't know if French military involvement in Africa has been particularly helpful to France, and it seems less likely still that it has been helpful to Africans (with a few exceptions, Jean-Bedel Bokassa comes to mind). I think you're underselling the effectiveness: there have been many post-colonial interventions by european forces that have ended in the european's favour. Sri Lanka's genocidal suppression of the Tamils, for example, or the propping up of Bahrain. The broader point is, at no point do these actions run against US interests.
      - toyg 5y ago
        > I don't know if French military involvement in Africa has been particularly helpful to France A number of African countries continue to store their reserves in France and work with the CFA Franc, which makes it worth it. > there have been many post-colonial interventions by european forces that have ended in the european's favour Yeah, but they are all in the past. It's today's news that the French failed in Mali. The combination of increasingly-difficult asymmetrical warfare (with guerrilla becoming more and more effective) and practical cuts to national budgets make such interventions increasingly ineffective. If even the superpowers cannot pacify medium-sized nation-states anymore, individual states have no realistic chance to achieve anything alone.
        nradov 5y ago
Ericson2314 5y ago
It is precisely the decades after decades resignation to "US number 1" that maintains this status quo! There is no inherent weakness of Europe. It has far more people than the US. All that welfare state makes it far more efficient too in many matters. A little "Military Keynesianism" would, frankly, be really good for solving Europe's problems of higher unemployement and whatnot too. I am generally against such things, but the welfare states make the risk of runway jobs guarantees and military industrial complexes less bad. In general, Europe missed out on Keynesianism it seems (the military or non military varieties). 70+ years of welfware states is being undone by stupid austerity. They figure out how to be good to the poor (unlike US) and not do austerity (like the US, despite what you may think), and they should leap ahaed of us. The "US-lead world order" is Europe's choice.
- pasabagi 5y ago
  If you look at GDP charts, the US is very dynamic in comparison to the EU. I think the EU is a better model, but when it comes to raw economic, military and diplomatic power, there's no comparison. If you go back to the decades in which the US became the world hegemon (post-war era) the difference is way more stark. It's not that the EU resigned - it's that the US muscled them out!
  - oblio 5y ago
    Europe was rebuilding after WW2 and it only started presenting a somewhat united front 30 years ago. The EU is barely a confederation, let alone a federal state.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    But that is precisely because a lack of autonomous spending in the EU! One theory is that in Europe in the 1980s, workers became so much more empowered that the private sector lost the will to invest. Start with https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf for the basic concept here, but there are many more examples. A VAT-funded balanced budget welfare state is a purely redistributional mechanism which, while great, is not sufficient to undo this sort of thing. Direct government spending like the military sort is a way around this. Maybe the workers are militant, but will the democracy just allow itself to decline military because you don't feel like dealing with that? Workers vote too, so I don't think so.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jltsiren 5y ago

> I can think of no European country that has an autonomous standing army, capable of deploying itself to the theater of operations That has been intentional. Deploying forces outside your borders is what empires do. It's out of scope for the military forces of ordinary countries. Most military forces only exist to defend their own territory. For most West European countries in the past 20-25 years, the only realistic threats were their neighbors and the US. Because all of those were allies, the primary purpose of the military was maintaining the readiness to scale up in case the world becomes more dangerous again. It will be interesting to see what will become of Europe now that Germany has decided they are allowed to act like an empire once again.

phicoh 5y ago
What have seen since WWII is that military attacks are extremely hard. Just about all successful missions have support of the local population in the attacked countries. Yes, the US can take over countries like Iraq or Afghanistan. And then what? Is there any net gain for the US? On the other hand, NATO bombings in former Yoguslavia led to a situation that is still more or less stable today. Russia quickly took over Crimea, which has strategic value and has support of the local population. But now they are stuck with a nasty and costly war in Ukraine. So it is not clear where in the world Germany would play 'empire'. I wonder to what extend an army can maintain an effective defence if there no need for any defence for many decades. Many western European countries have not been attacked since the end of WWII.

kodah 5y ago

The FFL is quite independent in terms of logistics, no? They recruit right out of my alma mater, the US Marines. What you're describing is taught to us as the difference between an occupying force and an expeditionary force. Occupying forces don't really need to be trained on seizing forward air bases because someone else does that. That kind of army functions a lot more like well-armed police. The Marines has a different decree, which holds most units at a high level of unit readiness because the president has the capacity to deploy them for 30 days at any given time. We operated most battlefield functions as internal jobs, aside from ships logistics, and cross-training is heavily emphasized to combat cost. Interestingly enough, the Marines is the smallest and least funded branch in the armed forces - so it would appear the difference is primarily in culture, logistics, and tactics. Edit: All this said, we operated and trained with British, Korean, Aussie, and Dutch military components that had and trained on these capabilities.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
> cross-training is heavily emphasized to combat cost. Could you unpack that? I don’t know what you mean, but it sounds interesting.
- gnu8 5y ago
  The USMC works hard on cross-training to reduce costs, meaning that they can go out and complete short term objectives using fewer guys than other groups might need.
  - kodah 5y ago
    Just to build on this a little: My MOS was a 2844, which was a Ground Radio Technician. I could repair and operate every radio the USMC had at an advanced level. I then received courses on how to provide EMT-level care on the battlefield, machine gunners school, vehicle operations (command, gunning, operation, egress, maneuvers), basic generator troubleshooting, vehicle maintenance training, artillery/medevac coordination, advanced SatComm training, etc... This is specifically so that teams are a) self-sustaining (one team can accomplish many jobs outside of their primary job) and b) to reduce the number of on-hand resources the USMC requires to function.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

There are lots of Americans who agree with you and would LOVE to see Europe get better at this stuff and take a load off of our national expenses and bank accounts :) .

phicoh 5y ago
The US has a big military-industrial complex. A capable EU-army might result in a focus on weapon production in the EU. Quite a loss for US industries.
orwin 5y ago
You're probably wrong on the effects though. I don't see the us defense contractors and arm producer accepting that much of a cut in their budgets. Also, an unified eu defense force would undercut a lot of military contracts between EU state and us companies, and the loss of customer in this market is quite hard to offset

sofixa 5y ago

I'm not entirely certain, but it seems that French operations in Mali were done with some German and British logistic help ( but nothing France doesn't have), and the US didn't participate.