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The reason is simple: you need extensive logistics support for expeditionary warfare. European states are not really structurally placed to engage in this kind

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
        Some of those countries will probably diversify their reserves into a broader mix of foreign currencies and precious metals. Recent sanctions against Russia have shown that no state can really rely upon reserves stored in a foreign bank. Access to those can be blocked with the stroke of a pen.
        pasabagi 5y ago
        > If even the superpowers cannot pacify medium-sized nation-states anymore, individual states have no realistic chance to achieve anything alone. My sort of uninformed reading of the problem in Mali / Sahel desert insurgencies is just that the French didn't do a very good job at a strategic level, which isn't really the military's fault. It strikes me that most of the western debacles have been essentially down to a pretty thin understanding of how to discover and support regional partners. There's no quantity of bombs or boots that would make the Afghan kleptocratic torture state command a plurality of support, and worse, the Americans were temperamentally incapable of building bridges with the kind of people that could form a stable government. My feeling is that resources aren't the problem: the problem is that (for a number of reasons) western policy making elites are just making the wrong decisions, both in terms of how ambitious their projects are (the post-invasion Iraq project was insane), and in terms of who they choose to work with. If you take Iraq for example, the US chose to marginalize Iran early on, despite the fact they would have been (practically speaking) a great partner, who were more than willing to involve themselves in Iraqi regime change.
  - omginternets 5y ago
    >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. You have that exactly backwards. The French expeditionary force can only be deployed with American approval because it requires American logistics. If this were not the case, you would have something approximating Russian expeditionary capabilities.
    - pasabagi 5y ago
      > You have that exactly backwards. No, my point is that the Suez crisis proves that even if you do have logistical independence, it doesn't matter, because the US can crash your economy and excoriate you in the UN if you do something they don't like.
      - omginternets 5y ago
        The US didn't single-handedly crash the British economy during the Suez crisis, and it wasn't a pure logistical/political defeat in the field, either. In fact, it was very much a military defeat, as well. The British defeat was the sum total of all these parameters rather than any single one. By contrast, France's ability to apply military force is interdicted by precisely one parameter: logistical dependence on the USA (worsened by the US' underhanded acquisition of Alstom, I might add). As such, I don't think your point stands.
        pasabagi 5y ago
        You keep on referring to it as a british defeat, but it was a joint effort between britian and France :). Iirc, the US didn't need to crash the british economy, they simply threatened to devalue the pound, denounced the invasion publicly, then the europeans called a ceasefire (unilaterally? I'm not sure). At no point in either the french nor the british military operations do you see either tactical defeats or supply issues.
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.

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
        Some of those countries will probably diversify their reserves into a broader mix of foreign currencies and precious metals. Recent sanctions against Russia have shown that no state can really rely upon reserves stored in a foreign bank. Access to those can be blocked with the stroke of a pen.
      - pasabagi 5y ago
        > If even the superpowers cannot pacify medium-sized nation-states anymore, individual states have no realistic chance to achieve anything alone. My sort of uninformed reading of the problem in Mali / Sahel desert insurgencies is just that the French didn't do a very good job at a strategic level, which isn't really the military's fault. It strikes me that most of the western debacles have been essentially down to a pretty thin understanding of how to discover and support regional partners. There's no quantity of bombs or boots that would make the Afghan kleptocratic torture state command a plurality of support, and worse, the Americans were temperamentally incapable of building bridges with the kind of people that could form a stable government. My feeling is that resources aren't the problem: the problem is that (for a number of reasons) western policy making elites are just making the wrong decisions, both in terms of how ambitious their projects are (the post-invasion Iraq project was insane), and in terms of who they choose to work with. If you take Iraq for example, the US chose to marginalize Iran early on, despite the fact they would have been (practically speaking) a great partner, who were more than willing to involve themselves in Iraqi regime change.
- omginternets 5y ago
  >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. You have that exactly backwards. The French expeditionary force can only be deployed with American approval because it requires American logistics. If this were not the case, you would have something approximating Russian expeditionary capabilities.
  - pasabagi 5y ago
    > You have that exactly backwards. No, my point is that the Suez crisis proves that even if you do have logistical independence, it doesn't matter, because the US can crash your economy and excoriate you in the UN if you do something they don't like.
    - omginternets 5y ago
      The US didn't single-handedly crash the British economy during the Suez crisis, and it wasn't a pure logistical/political defeat in the field, either. In fact, it was very much a military defeat, as well. The British defeat was the sum total of all these parameters rather than any single one. By contrast, France's ability to apply military force is interdicted by precisely one parameter: logistical dependence on the USA (worsened by the US' underhanded acquisition of Alstom, I might add). As such, I don't think your point stands.
      - pasabagi 5y ago
        You keep on referring to it as a british defeat, but it was a joint effort between britian and France :). Iirc, the US didn't need to crash the british economy, they simply threatened to devalue the pound, denounced the invasion publicly, then the europeans called a ceasefire (unilaterally? I'm not sure). At no point in either the french nor the british military operations do you see either tactical defeats or supply issues.

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.