32 ms·

The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities

268 points by gabythenerd 3y ago

DubiousPusher 3y ago
> But because the leaders of a country like Venezuela know that, they may well try to avoid developing their country into such a weak state in the first place. Sure, bribery and corruption are fun, but only if you live long enough to use it; it’s not worth ruining the economy if the only consequence is being killed when Brazil, Colombia or the United States invades. Interesting read but the above point is moot. History features many selfish leaders letting their kingdom, fief, colony, what have you fall into exactly that state of affairs. And when they were occupied, as often as not, the leadership was left intact so long as the tribute did flow. This is true from the ancient world up to through the 20th century. > This is why, I’d argue, you see the proliferation of failed states globally: in the past it would be actively profitable for non-failed states to take advantage of them Sure, there may be more independently standing "failed states" but occupation by a "more competent" power was rarely a corrective. These largely just became failed vassals. The little bit of bureaucratic support imposed by the occupier usually had the effect of depriving locals of the experience of self development and coordination and thus deepening and prolonging the crises within. > I should note I find this version of the argument, based on incentives and interests more compelling than Steven Pinker’s version of the argument based on changing cultural mores. > The value of the oil and other resources would be less than the cost of maintaining control of the country. The reasons that managing such a country would be too costly now vs in the past are almost purely cultural. Treating an occupied place like a colony has diplomatic and internal consequences for the occupier (not enough in my opinion but much more than in the past). And much more importantly, the cultural inventions of nationalism and total insurgent warfare have made it much harder to maintain an occupation. Yes, there were insurgencies in the past but the cultural expectation that hundreds of thousands or even millions of people will live in craters, subsist on worms and rats, forgoe medicine, endure exposure, hunger, pain and trauma for years or decades or even generations to guarantee self rule. The cultural invention of nationalistic mass resistance depends on technological innovations. You need modern small arms and explosives to make every cell of 20 or so fighters a threat which can't be ignored by an occupier. You need modern communication to coordinate these cells. And of course the value of this cultural invention is in its ubiquity. So you need an era of sentimental propaganda that depends on modern mass media to disseminate it. Ultimately technology and culture are not separate things. They shape each other as they develop and sometimes they are one in the same.
droopyEyelids 3y ago
Its not the main point of the article, but it made me wonder if finance is the new way “war” (predatory struggle for ownership & control) is waged in today’s world
- karmakaze 3y ago
  Finance is man-made. Resources are real. But the point makes sense in that it's a main point of competition with sports being another.
  - michaelt 3y ago
    Finance may be man-made. But 200 years ago for a rich country to obtain a poor country's natural resources they had to invade an army and add it to their empire; while in the modern age, the rich country can swap the natural resources for pieces of paper they can print at will. Why bother to invade under such circumstances?
  - n3v3r3v3r 3y ago
    Man-made things are real! Finance is the lazy abstraction we use to represent "resources." Competition also does not exist for competitions sake, it exists as a result of multiple agents within a specific context engaging in activity that has "winners" and "losers" (this is not a great way to put this but I'm trying not to think too hard about the specific theoretical nuances of what competition _is_, but more what it's used _for_). For sports, this context is highly constrained to whatever game is being played and so its impacts are limited to the scope of that game and those involved with its orchestration/spectacle (definitionally!). On the other hand, global trade is unconstrained by a specific range of activity (there are states with laws that try and combat this but ultimately money is money). This is much closer in effect to the "real" physical violence of war. By controlling an entity financially, you control that entities ability to exist in a financial context and so when that world of finance becomes the dominant form of interaction you are effectively enacting violence upon and limiting the expression of that thing (i.e. the conquest and subjugation of people/land but with money instead of swords). In contemporary hyper-reality it is a common mistake to ascribe "unrealness" to things like money or the internet, in such a way that we can box out their effects from our understandings. Then, when those systems are employed to reinforce and/or expand existing hierarchies that layer of smoke and mirrors is able to effectively divert attention away from their _very real_ impacts. At the same time they become both non-things and the backdrop on which everything else exists. "Just turn off the computer" "Just don't purchase exploitative things" "Just do your own research" [Ad infinitum...] These bits of rhetoric shift the unfathomable inertia of Things™ onto the shoulders of the individual, be it a person, organization or state without recognition as to why that entity is doing the thing that it is doing in the context of everything else that is doing something around it. There is probably already a term for it but this seems to itself be a kind of logical fallacy ("ex homine"?) that collapses the scale of a problem down to the decision of an individual. Thus it enters the scope of opinion and so is unreal and unworthy of discussion or understanding. Nuance and complexity are shunted away systemically because complex solutions and understandings do not engage well with efficiency. Because things that are economically efficient are those things which can be spread through economics, even the ideas around what it means to be economic can be distorted by this effect in such a way to detach people further and further from reality while assuring them that they are the only ones that _really_ understand how the world works (in "economic" terms). It is a battlefield that is at war with all other battlefields--and it is winning.
A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
"We have all noticed that the Russian military appears far less capable than we thought it was; frankly it seems incapable of even some of the very basic tasks of modern industrial armies engaged in conventional military operations." I wondered about that. For the record, I have zero evidence of this as reliable records are hard to find in that arena. Chechnya was Russia's bigger conflict and now, unlike Syria and few other spots, Russia's approach resembled anti-terrorist stance ( pop in for a quick action and hold a small group keeping tabs on things ). The societies that seem to have a handle on this are ones that currently do not have peace ( say Ukraine or Israel, where both deal with an enemy threat on a regular basis ). "Instead, the new incentive for most countries would be to build a military in a way that aims to minimize the political costs, rather than maximize combat power or even ‘security'." I am willing to agree on this one. There is a clear weariness in US for giving military even more money. I am seeing something similar in the old country and that is despite Russian aggression aimed at Ukraine. "Meanwhile, maximizing the army for repression means developing paramilitary internal police forces at scale (Rosgvardiya is an obvious example), which direct resources away from core conventional military; such security-oriented forces aren’t designed for a conventional war and perform poorly at it." The argument seems valid, but I am not entirely convinced. Secret police is not new to Russia and if any country has their apparatus working, it likely is Russia. If that is the case, it makes it difficult for me to believe that they do not have a working system that recognizes and gives some leeway, like any wars before that, to people doing the actual fighting ( like.. you don't put a front soldier in Gulag just because he openly says Putin is a dick ). That said, the argument does provide an explanation for Russia's failure. I am just not sure I agree though. "revanchist powers (Israel, Taiwan, Poland, Finland, Ukraine, etc.)" I found the listing of Poland and Finland interesting, but I am not sure what argument for keeping them on that list is. " Of course the big unanswered and at the moment unanswerable question is where countries like India or the People’s Republic of China fit." I am not sure it is unanswerable. Some people have definitely taken a stab at it. Right now, the momentum seems to be generating a new axis with both India and China rising as new powers and flexing their individual muscles ( we hear a lot about China, but that seems like it is mostly, because it is US's current main concern ).
- jandrese 3y ago
GartzenDeHaes 3y ago
> Experience needs to be retained and institutionalized. Capable leaders need to be promoted and incapable but politically influential leaders sidelined. Also applies to government, business, and academia.
- wolfram74 3y ago
  But those organizations can have fitness pressure applied to them outside the context of hot wars. People love to make a big deal of the "fund N losers to find 1 winner" aspect of VC.
safety1st 3y ago
This stuff about the world being peaceful due to the industrial revolution doesn't make a lot of sense to me. For one thing, the IR significantly predated WW1 and WW2. It didn't prevent those, so how'd it cause the "long peace" afterwards? The predominant theory about this in international relations is hegemonic stability theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemonic_stability_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemonic_stability_theory - there have been several periods throughout history that were relatively peaceful because an exceptionally strong nation state decided to step up and enforce a peace. Considering that the US was half of global GDP at the end of WW2 and has long been more than happy to sanction anyone who conducts in an (unapproved) war (such as Russia right now), the modern era of "long peace" fits this theory pretty well.
- georgeg23 3y ago
  That theory ignores the Cold War, which hinged on M.A.D.
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    Why do you say that?
  - jdlshore 3y ago
    In what way? The fundamental argument is that war is less profitable than economic competition, which is exactly how the Cold War progressed, and why the US won. Edit: My mistake, I thought you were talking about Deveraux’s theory, but it looks like you were talking about the Economic Stability Theory OP mentioned.
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      > The fundamental argument is that war is less profitable than economic competition, which is exactly how the Cold War progressed, and why the US won. So for countries that lose the economic competition, might war be a 'better' option?
      - 3y ago
georgeg23 3y ago
One of the less spoken but potentially significant reasons for Russia's invasion is that Putin felt the nuclear tables were about to turn with M.A.D. when the U.S. restarted Strategic Defense Initiative development. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
- scythe 3y ago
  UCS statement on the establishment of the Space Force and attendant risks of a new arms race (2018): https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/space-based-missile-defense-0 https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/space-based-missile-defense...
  - georgeg23 3y ago
    I agree with UCS, and even the threat of an SDI can lead to an arms race.
digging 3y ago
Still, reading, but I'm looking forward to this. I've read a lot of the author's other posts about things like military organization in LOTR and theory of history in Crusader Kings. I typically find the tone to be careful and nuanced but also engaging. I am likely unqualified to really determine the merits of a given argument in this article, but I feel confident I can trust the author to present them fairly.
ihm 3y ago
A lot of cogent analysis here, but I’m surprised the author doesn’t seem to know about the economic and political forms of warfare which the US has been pursuing as a cheaper alternative to conventional war. To use Venezuela as an example, the author says no one has tried to invade it (which is actually not even true, see below) but also the US has been imposing crippling sanctions for over 15 years in an attempt to punish the people and weaken the government. Moreover there was a US supported coup attempt in 2002 and one basically cooked up entirely by the US in 2020 (Operation Gideon). This was a plan to actually invade the country by boat with a small force to try to take control of the government. This is part of a pattern of behavior for the US in the 20th century. The book Washington Bullets does a good job cataloguing the various interventions of this form.
- MostlyStable 3y ago
  So, not to come off as "these are good things" or anything, but you have to be able to see that "economic warfare" is preferable to "warfare warfare", right? It would obviously be better to have neither, but if I have to pick one, I know which one I'm going to pick, and I don't think it's unreasonable to characterize a switch from traditional warfare to economic warfare as "more peaceful" or even just "peaceful".
  - pphysch 3y ago
    You don't have to pick one. Venezuela has approximately zero capability to wage any flavor of warfare against the USA, and certainly didn't provoke the current hybrid war by threatening USA national security.
  - 5040 3y ago
    >you have to be able to see that "economic warfare" is preferable to "warfare warfare", right? Economic warfare can resemble the sieges of traditional warfare. Yemen was blockaded "economically" to prevent food and medical aid from entering the country. Syrians were only getting an hour of electricity per day in recent memory because of economic strictures preventing them from importing oil. It can get pretty brutal.
- 3y ago
IceHegel 3y ago
The Grand Illusion II
photochemsyn 3y ago
This blog post has some curious blind spots that, if taken into account, negate most of its primary thesis about 'the long peace'. The focus of the post is two-fold: the recent outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, in truncated form (the war has been going on at a low level since 2014, with militia forces supplied by Russia and Ukraine fighting one another in eastern Ukraine throughout that period), and a recommendation for a book about a naval battle in World War II. Hmm... what about Vietnam and Iraq? This is pretty standard American exceptionalist propaganda-speak, as seen in corporate media and Hollywood: lots of material on WWII, and on today's conflict. It's obvious why neither Vietnam nor Iraq/Afghanistan are mentioned in the post, those being the largest post-war conflicts the US was involved in. The Vietnam War was in many ways the result of European colonial powers (France) to hold onto their colonial possessions post-WWII; the US could have supported Vietnam independence in 1945 but chose to allow France to try to seize control again, and then took over from the French under JFK's tenure, and spent about a decade killing Vietnamese people in a futile effort to keep the puppet South Vietnam government in power. There was also an element of Cold War proxy fight. The Iraq War is even less defensible; the WMD claims were deliberate lies concocted by the CIA on the orders of the Bush Administration and supported by the UK's Blair government. Basically a class A war crime. Similarly, the debacles in Afghanistan (NATO-backed), and Libya (NATO-backed) don't get any scrutiny. As far as nuclear weapons, well, they haven't stopped war, just pushed the conflicts into various proxy wars, as seen in the India-Pakistan border region. The architects and profiteers of war don't want to get nuked themselves, though they are quite happy to send kids off to die in these conflicts, so nuclear weapons are somewhat stabilizing, barring some accident or other.
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  The blind spots are entirely your own. The very first paragraph of the article includes: "the period since WWII which has had a low and indeed falling level of war, both inter-state and intra-state. Normally, when I say this is something that has happened, I find I encounter a great deal of incredulity among the general public. Surely they can list off any number of wars or other violent conflicts that happened recently. But the data here is actually quite strong (and we all know my attitude towards certainty on points of real uncertainty; this is not one of them) – violence has been falling worldwide for nearly 80 years, the fall has been dramatic and relatively consistent." > standard American exceptionalist propaganda-speak "the USA’s record as a neighbor to Central and South America is not one we ought generally to be proud of"
avgcorrection 3y ago
> I’ve discussed this before a few times, but I think Azar Gat is probably right to suggest that the long peace is itself a consequence of the changing incentives created by the industrial revolution and to an even greater extent, by nuclear weapons. Prior to the industrial revolution, war was the best way to get rich (if you won) because land and conquered subjects were so much more valuable than any kind of capital investment (infrastructure, manufacture, tools, etc.) that could have been developed with the same resources. The industrial revolution changes this, both by making war a lot more destructive (thus lowering returns to successful warfare)1 while at the same time massively raising returns to capital investment in things like infrastructure, factories and tractors. It suddenly made more sense, if you coveted your neighbors resources, to build more factories and buy those resources than to try to seize them by force. Nuclear weapons in turn took this same effect and ratcheted it up even further, by effectively making the cost of total war infinite. I’m getting such Beltway Think Tank vibes for some reason.
- jameshart 3y ago
  Well sure - this is just fairly conventional international relations theory. Trying to apply systems thinking to the question of ‘why conflict’ is basically the entire academic discipline of international politics and strategic studies. This particular take is basically a standard neorealist perspective on how to explain the impact of globalization in reducing conflict. Basically allowing that trade changes the playing field, without allowing that states might be anything other than selfish entities, or that there might be any relevant entities to consider in international affairs (like nonstate actors, cultural power, etc). Other schools of IR theory take different perspectives, but neorealism is basically the foundational view of western foreign policy.
- safety1st 3y ago
  Honestly another thing I didn't like about this peace was the "Russian army is weak so maybe lots of other armies are weak" idea. That's the last thing we need the chickenhawks running DC to believe
  - noduerme 3y ago
JacobiX 3y ago
Another possibility for the period of relatively long peace is the modern equivalent of The Pax Romana. For reference Pax Romana, describes a 200-year era in the Roman Empire from 27 B.C.E. to 180 C.E. This timeframe marked a significant phase of peace and remarkable economic growth achieved through hegemony. The US has the biggest economy and the largest military spending by far.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  Other periods of peace have shown up in history when one empire is the undisputed hegemon of the known world. The pax brittanica is another example, as are several periods in Chinese history. We are living in the pax Americana right now, but it is unclear how long that will last.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  Rome was still actively campaigning on its borders and violently suppressing revolts in the provinces during that time period. But it probably felt very peaceful from the perspective of (middle- and upper-class) Romans, especially in contrast to the constant warfare and chaos of the centuries before and after.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - telotortium 3y ago
    Not so different from the US, really. I'm sure Middle Easterners speak of the "Pax" Americana in sarcastic tones.
- throwawayPAX 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Americana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Americana
- CRConrad 3y ago
  > Another possibility for the period of relatively long peace is the modern equivalent of The Pax Romana. “Another” than what? This was exactly what TFA was about.
newuser94303 3y ago
I think that Globalization has increased the costs of war. You don't want to attack your suppliers. I also think that China is probably a paper tiger on offense but they are trying not to look like an easy target on defense. Most of their recent battles have been fist fights in the Himalayas. Deglobalization is an attempt to make war feasible because some strong countries feel like they are losing economic war and want to fall back on real war.
- marianatom 3y ago
  here's the thing, humanity got lucky. there was a nonzero chance that china and the dictatorships could have triumphed. if China didn't botch the chance to overtake US in 2008 with a capable dictator. if China got its hands on many advanced US military technologies. if Russia didn't botch the Ukraine invasion. if covid didn't have a vaccine, except one that China developed. I'm sure most of us are aware of the gulags that China ran in 2022, in the most prosperous city like Shanghai, with welded doors, lack of food, arbitrary killing of pets, moving their own citizens against their wills to camps or cells with no running water and unsanitary conditions. with cries in tall buildings from families in the middle of night for food. If. you haven't seen these things, go watch it online. Imagine if somehow China succeeded, and that's most of humanity's fate.
  - wazer5 3y ago
    Wow you should visit China though, it's great. I feel for those who don't get to experience the benefits of globalization.
    - marianatom 3y ago
      lol, how presumptuous. I have visited China in 2007, before it turned authoritarian/dictatorship. I would not visit China again to support the dictatorship. I can visit any number of democratic countries like Taiwan. I feel for those who don't get that they are supporting evil. Btw, speaking of evil, China isn't giving up yet (Xi still have 10-20 years to live. free organ transplants from young Chinese, you know. high ranking politicians get them for free). It is producing destroyers at a massive rate, and will exceed # of destroyers that US has by 2040. Combined with the millions of disposable unemployed single young men, and there's still a chance that Taiwan would overwhelmed. and if Taiwan falls, the same strategy can be used to conquer Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Australia.
noduerme 3y ago
>> " What is [sic] – quietly, because they haven’t tried to launch a major invasion recently – most militaries are probably similarly incapable of the basic tasks of industrial warfare?" This premise is delusional. The Russian military may have degraded, but the war in Ukraine shows clearly that the only aspect of warfare that has significantly changed since WWII is the vastly increased efficiency in targeting weapons payloads. Which can be unwound at any moment when smart munitions run thin. The idea that today's conscripts are less willing to fight than those in 1940 is ludicrous. Neither wanted to fight and both were ignorant blobs / yobs. The long peace has been sustained only by mutually assured destruction. That construct has not been slowly undermined by any determined wish for unity contrary to it on the part of the people living under the regimes which are yoked into that system. There is every indication that disrupting that system would lead to one party or another committing a nuclear holocaust, so therefore the balance of terror (including Putin's repression of Russians) must be preserved at all costs.
- FpUser 3y ago
  >"The long peace has been sustained only by mutually assured destruction" I tend to agree. Well, relative piece, as smaller wars are still constant feature.
- JacobThreeThree 3y ago
  >We have all noticed that the Russian military appears far less capable than we thought it was; frankly it seems incapable of even some of the very basic tasks of modern industrial armies engaged in conventional military operations. It's an unfalsifiable premise because the performance of the military is compared against a nebulous "less capable than we thought it was" bar, which by all accounts was clearly, albeit in hindsight, an incorrect worldview where Russia was supposedly going to conquer all of NATO in Europe in 3 days: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a21344/us-claims-russia-could-defeat-nato-in-60-hours/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a21344/us-...
KineticLensman 3y ago
> For those unfamiliar with the concept, the ‘long peace’ is a term we apply to the period since WWII which has had a low and indeed falling level of war, both inter-state and intra-state. There's an alternative view is that there was a long war essentially from the beginning of WW1 to the collapse of communism [0]. The so-called long peace also included the Korean War, the Vietnam war, various Arab-Israeli conflicts. I've seen it stated that there were only in fact a few days of peace in the entire 20C: the very brief period between Japan's surrender in August 1945 to the start of conflict that gradually ramped to the Vietnam war, when an Anglo/French force supported by rearmed Japanese took on the Viet Minh[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shield_of_Achilles:_War,_Peace,_and_the_Course_of_History#Long_War_(20th_century) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shield_of_Achilles:_War,_P... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Vietnam_(1945–1946) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Vietnam_(1945–1946)
jamesgill 3y ago
"Normally, when I say this is something that has happened, I find I encounter a great deal of incredulity among the general public." No, not just the general public; the 'long peace' is a hotly contested idea amongst academic and professional circles too. And, it's arguably a rather large amount of hand-wavey bullshit trying to paint certain nation states in a particular light and narrowly define 'war', 'peace', and 'violence'.
- bendbro 3y ago
  > And, it's arguably a rather large amount of hand-wavey bullshit trying to paint certain nation states in a particular light and narrowly define 'war', 'peace', and 'violence' tl;dr lefty academics disagree?
akkartik 3y ago
My only quibble with this article: it fails to apply its own conclusions to the US. The balance of evidence (Pentagon procurement processes and cost overruns of major projects) shows the US military too has a significant paper component.
- pdonis 3y ago
  Where does the article claim this is not the case?
  - akkartik 3y ago
    For one, it's alluding to other countries but not really holding up the US in much of the article. Second, this quote at the end: > Consequently, I suspect Russia is not the only paper tiger out there; the forest is likely to be full of them.. the exceptions are likely to be.. or because they form the backbone of an international system which requires that someone carry a big stick (the United States).
    - pdonis 3y ago
      Ah, I see; you're not sure the big stick is actually as big as the article assumes. Yes, fair point.
- AbrahamParangi 3y ago
  While possibly true, the US has been nearly continuously engaged in conflict somewhere in the world since WWII.
  - akkartik 3y ago
    Hence the word "component". It certainly seems more real than other paper tigers.
pphysch 3y ago
This article is based on the flawed premise that the Russia-Ukraine war was overwhelmingly one-sided in Russia's favor, eliding the fact that Ukraine had, over nearly a decade, amassed the next largest land army in Europe, trained by NATO, armed by NATO, guided by NATO intelligence, and side-by-side with Western PMCs. In many aspects, they were peer competitors on the battlefield. The "paper tiger" argument would have made more sense had Russia unsuccessfully invaded Kiev in 2014. But a lot can change in 8 years. Yes, Russia has had the advantage in long-range strike capability, but they chose not to strike command centers early in the war (contrast with the surprise airstrike on Saddam Hussein's palace 20 years ago, which kicked off Washington's unprovoked invasion).
- lisasays 3y ago
  Amassed the next largest land army in Europe, trained by NATO, armed by NATO, .. Utter BS, both in terms of raw numbers and contextually -- in "eliding" the fact that they were invaded by a certain neighboring country in 2014. As you are perfectly aware. Please stop posting nonsense like this.
  - pphysch 3y ago
    Yes, Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea induced NATO to heavily militarize Ukraine. Were you not aware of this? It was kept quiet, but not exactly secret. > Since Crimea was annexed in 2014, the U.S. and partner militaries have helped grow Ukraine’s forces from just over 100,000 troops to nearly 250,000 [in 2017]. Just since January, Capt. Christopher’s unit of 250 soldiers has added another 3,000 or so Ukrainian soldiers to Kiev’s ranks. https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2017/10/ukraine-us-trains-army-west-fight-east/141577/ https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2017/10/ukraine-us-trains...
    - lisasays 3y ago
      The language in your post (particularly where you say "over a decade") misleadingly suggests that there was significant buildup pre-2014. And that poor, frightened Russia has just reacting the way any country would, in response to this imagined buildup.
nerdponx 3y ago
I'm surprised to hear the author state that war is more destructive than in the past. Is that actually true? Certainly we are more capable of destruction than in the past, but modern millitaries have put a lot of effort into being less broadly destructive, unless they specifically intend to broadly destroy things. Photos of bombed-out cities in Syria are jarring, but even the worst devastation there doesn't look as bad as what we saw in WWII, WWI, or even the American Civil War. When is the last time a city was "sacked" or a countryside "pillaged"? When is the last time an entire city population was executed? If anything, it seems like war is much less destructive than it used to be, because weaponry and tactics are much more precise than they used to be.
- pdonis 3y ago
  > Certainly we are more capable of destruction than in the past That is what the article is referring to when it talks about war being a lot more destructive--that if we choose to wage a total war, like we did in WW II, we can potentially destroy a lot more than at any time in human history. But the article is arguing that that very fact has prevented countries from trying to wage total war, because the costs now greatly outweigh the benefits. So the actual destructiveness of actual wars has gone down. > If anything, it seems like war is much less destructive than it used to be, because weaponry and tactics are much more precise than they used to be. I think this is true, but it's also true that more precise weaponry and tactics also change the goals of war. You can't conquer a country, or reclaim a country that someone else conquered, with low-level targeted munitions. But you can do things like eliminate terrorist leaders or take out particular dangerous capabilities (like the Israelis bombing Iraq's Osirak nuclear weapons plants) without having a major impact on the rest of the population. This kind of change is exactly what the article is describing when it says that democracies now have an incentive to build a military not for fighting a conventional war but for "the kinds of actions which mitigate the harm caused by failed states" (of which terrorism is one).
- mcguire 3y ago
  "It is really quite hard for ancient or medieval armies to do meaningful long-term damage to an agricultural economy; farmers flee, crops are hard to destroy and in any case armies can’t do anything to the land itself. [...] Even a sustained collapse might mean something like only a 25% reduction in total production; by contrast Liberia lost 90% of its GDP in just six years of internal warfare from 1989 to 1995." Now, I could pick some nits with that: crops are not that hard to destroy. But that just results in a few years of famine. On the other hand, a proper counterexample would be the Thirty Years War, but I don't know what the actual long term consequences for the northern German economy were.
michaelt 3y ago
> What is – quietly, because they haven’t tried to launch a major invasion recently – most militaries are probably similarly incapable of the basic tasks of industrial warfare? I once read an article that argued in the absence of war, it's impossible to tell if a doctrine or commander is good or not. Maybe you've got five officers up for promotion. One officer wants to give soldiers high-tech equipment, a heads-up display in every helmet and a grenade-dropping drone in every backpack. One officer wants to train loads of soldiers as linguists, so they can win hearts and minds in any country they might occupy. One officer wants to focus on PR at home, as maintaining a steady supply of cash and adventurous young men is key to winning any conflict. One officer wants to cut bureaucracy and red tape, as every individual in a support function is someone not in a front-line function, and it's front line fighters that win battles. One officer thinks the important thing is physical conditioning and classic soldiering - Marching, marksmanship, long hikes carrying heavy backpacks. How do you decide who to promote, if it's 30 years since you were last at war and none of them has ever won a real battle?
- distortedsignal 3y ago
  How do you know which conflict you're going to fight next? Each of these commanders may be better suited to a different conflict. The commander who is competent in one conflict may be a buffoon in a different conflict. Even winning battles doesn't necessarily set up a commander for success. If your enemy changes between conflicts (say, going from a near-peer adversary to an insurgent adversary, a-la-Gulf War 1 -> Gulf War 2, or insurgency to near-peer, a-la Russia-in-Chechnya to Russia-in-Ukraine), radically different strategy, operations, and tactics are required. I think this goes a long way to explaining the old saying "everyone prepares to win the last war." It boils down to "this guy did good last time, he'll do good this time too" when what helped him the last time is a very specific way of thinking that is not applicable now. TL;DR: Responding to Change over Following a Plan
- munificent 3y ago
  Or, in software engineering terms, it's impossible to optimize code that you can't profile.
karaterobot 3y ago
The long post-war era of peace is due to a number of factors, but the one we don't talk about enough is that the U.S. spent untold trillions of dollars becoming a global police force. This may be the biggest factor. I believe it is certainly the prerequisite for any others to have had an effect. The problem is that the U.S. has a tiger by the tail: if they want to continue in this role, they'll need to step up spending to cold war levels to have a chance of taking on China. This has a tremendous cost, culturally and economically. If they don't, we'll see (as we are seeing) increased global disorder and rearmament by, for example, European and Asian powers. This will likely lead to more wars in the future. One thing I am certain of: humans didn't just spontaneously become peaceful after WWII. Some energy is being expended to maintain what passes for global peace, and that energy will have to continue being expended for any conceivable time scale.
- bilbo0s 3y ago
  This thinking is also kind of a problem in itself though right. I mean, even if there was no China. OK. Great. Now what? You've still got India giving Russia as many drones as Russia desires every month. Is India, or even South Africa for that matter, ever going to lose its ability to produce drones for Russia? No. The essential problem is that we live in a multi-polar world. Multiple nations can sustain themselves. Multiple nations can arm themselves. Multiple nations can exert influence in arenas that previously only the West could exert influence. China, the US, India, Russia, the EU. All of these power centers are realities, and they all sometimes have conflicting agendas. We're even reaching a point where they need each other less and less. In fact, the linkages in terms of, for example, global trade at times may be driving some of the problems. (See climate change.) I'm not sure we know how to operate in this world. We focus so much on one "adversary", and without fail, we end up in conflict with another of the global powers or civilizations. I think this is because of the strangeness of this environment to us. Ukraine is a good example. You could argue that we didn't even bother to understand India's position on this before we issued an edict regarding sanctions. An edict that India promptly ignored. That's kind of a tell tale sign that we didn't really understand the underlying environment. Worse, I'm not sure we even tried to understand it? Did anyone ever actually solicit India's input in any meaningful way? I'm not sure they did. So as long as that lack of understanding persists, I'm pretty sure we'll continue to stumble from one crisis to the next. None of which will be the crisis we plan for.
kajumix 3y ago
"Prior to the long peace, there’s little question what happens to a country like Venezuela, which is essentially a giant pile of barely guarded wealth: one – or several – of its neighbors would move in, oust the government and seize the territory and its valuable resources (oil, in this case)." While I don't advocate war and violence, I can't help think that such a hostile takeover of a poorly run country by another better run country can be perceived as creative destruction in capitalism. War is too costly now reassuringly, but the incentive of leaders to keep the country strong, economically as well as militarily, is much less. The fear of being wiped out by a neighbor may have kept leaders in check. Now that fear is gone, and nothing has replaced it yet. The optimist in me hopes that states abandon the pretense of being above markets. The fear we desire in those who run states, the fear that we hope will keep them in check, will be that of losing paying customers, their citizens, to other competitive jurisdictions.
- Nasrudith 3y ago
  The war has long been internalized in "Banana Republic" or "Resource Cursed" situations with coups. It has the same element of fear of being killed. Of course that also has different definitions of "poorly run" and "strong". "Not funneling enough oil money into the military's pockets." could count as "poorly run" and "military well under control" as "strong". Dictators tend to have shitty armies because they depend upon buying loyalty and/or setting up self-sabotaging hierarchies beneath them to stay on top. They are good enough to oppress their own populace just fine but tend to get their asses handed to them when they ill-advisedly attempt external use.
nitwit005 3y ago
> because it no longer makes economic sense to do so. The value of the oil and other resources would be less than the cost of maintaining control of the country That's always been the case. People used to just murder or enslave the populations they conquered. While you can get away with mass genocide and slavery internally, it has gotten far riskier to attempt such a thing against a neighboring state. It'll also destroy your status as a leader, when previously a violent conquest was often viewed as "glorious".
- pdonis 3y ago
  > That's always been the case. People used to just murder or enslave the populations they conquered. I don't understand. Murdering or enslaving the population of the conquered country is a lot cheaper as a way to maintain control of it. So the fact that it's a lot harder politically to do those things now, than it was in the past, greatly increases the cost of maintaining control of a country. As the article says.
  - nitwit005 3y ago
    What's changed isn't the economics, it's what other leaders will do if you attempt it.
    - pdonis 3y ago
      I would say both have changed. The economics has changed because, even leaving out political factors, the benefit of invading a country has greatly decreased, because the kind of war you need to wage to invade a country now will destroy whatever wealth in that country you were hoping to gain by invading it. And the political factors have changed because previous ways of trying to reduce the cost of controlling a country will now trigger consequences (in the form of actions by other countries) that they didn't before.
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    "Murdering or enslaving the population of the conquered country is a lot cheaper as a way to maintain control of it." Depends on what you need the country for. Nazis crushed the Czechoslovak state and executed any guerrillas caught fighting them, but they didn't mess with ordinary Czech workers, who were needed to keep the factories running. Mistreating qualified workers would decrease total industrial output and harm the German war effort.
Merad 3y ago
I thought I recognized the site. This the same author who wrote very detailed analysis of the Siege of Gondor and the Battle of Helms Deep from LOTR as well as articles about military and political topics from Game of Thrones, and many real-world historical topics. They're a military historian IRL and have a lot of content worth reading: https://acoup.blog/resources-for-world-builders/ https://acoup.blog/resources-for-world-builders/
- akiselev 3y ago
  Brett Devereaux (or Ollie, really) is very popular on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=acoup.blog https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=acoup.blog
- syndacks 3y ago
  Yea I thought the article was going to be about the military too but it opened up with a photo of a dog.
_8j50 3y ago
The important to note imo is the length of the period:80. A 17 year old 80 years ago is 97. The last of the generation that were alive during WW2 are dying. Putin himself grew up in the shadow of his brother who died in WW2. Those that knew war, kept peace. But now, especially with gen-z, there is less alarm and awareness of war. All the tech and military advancement mean war would be even more horrific and cruel but also as you can see in ukraine the usage of drones and remore controlled artillery is reshaping war. Keep in mind, the rules of war only apply to the loser. The wars most western people alive today are familiar with are fought in remote countries and between soldiers. If your homeland was threatened most of your people will support breaking every rule of war.
mikewarot 3y ago
The first time I heard Eric Weinstein call for periodic above ground nuclear weapons demonstrations[1], I thought it was nuts. That's because I grew up with the threat of the H-Bomb[2] and the impending nightmares that I've had ever since (though thankfully they are infrequent these days). Seeing how casually people dismiss the possible effects of a war involving 10,000 of these weapons has caused me to re-evaluate things. We should have am internationally sanctioned thermonuclear weapons demo every few years, at least once per decade, but less than annually. To remind everyone what's at stake. [1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/G23s5TX1QRM https://www.youtube.com/shorts/G23s5TX1QRM [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon
- soperj 3y ago
  Why not just play videos of previous demos as if it's news.
  - mikewarot 3y ago
    Because, just like the moon landings, people will deny they exist at some point.
    - AlexandrB 3y ago
      I'm pretty sure that unless they witness it firsthand, the same people will deny it exists even with a live broadcast.
    - soperj 3y ago
      People still deny that the earth is round. Doesn't really matter about the demos going on. Question, do moon landing deniers deny everything due to space? like do they think that the current SpaceX stuff is all cgi? What about the space shuttle? Or is it literally just going to the moon that they don't believe in?
      - rad_gruchalski 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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hackandthink 3y ago
Nassim Taleb's critique of the "long peace": "We investigate the theses of “long peace” and drop in violence and find that these are statistically invalid and resulting from flawed and naive methodologies, ..." https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf Our technology is smarter than our politics. We will be lucky if we don't blow up everything.
downWidOutaFite 3y ago
I see no mention of the UN in these discussions. The post-wwii international order has been maintained in large part thanks to the global agreement to recognize the UN as the venue to arbitrer large disputes. But there's a dangerous growing movement to denigrate the UN for various ideological reasons.
dirtyid 3y ago
Pinker's "long peace" theory with respect to global conflict is likely bad statistics - 20th-21st century under US military hegemony had a comparable if not higher number of conflicts, see Max Roser’s work documenting global conflicts over the past 600 years. What has changed is that war now is generally shorter and less deadly especially towards combatants, but that's more reflective of the pace of modern war enabled by modern weapons. High intensity wars don't last for 20+ years anymore because you can pretty much destroy nations in 1-5, and belligerents are quicker to exhaust and forced to settle. In aggregate war fatalities is down, but not # of conflicts. US hegemony didn't stop USSR and RU from warring in their periphery, nor PRC border skirmishes pre 90s when US had vast more naval power asymmetry. When countries want to fight for their interests, especially regional, they still do. Ultimately, US military dominance is good for US+LIO interests / serenity, but hard to extrapolate anything more. IMO multipolarity will increase the chance of "smaller" conflicts as poles assert their own interests for sure, but it's going to be around the baseline of conflicts that's consistently been simmering throughout history. The fear is increasing large-scale conflict between poles/blocks - ending the cyclic gap between major wars among major powers - but that's what happens when declining hegemon pushes their interests to the exclusion of others too intensely for too long.
hackandthink 3y ago
In the Ukraine conflict, I was surprised that the military is more reasonable than the politicians. (Vad and Kujat in Germany, Milley in USA). Who want's to fight? It doesn't seem to be the military.
iskander 3y ago
> But in a world where most invasions are – or at least ought to be – self-deterring, for countries that do not have revanchist neighbors who might launch a stupid war of conquest out of pique Seems a bit dismissive about the degree of revanchism in many former empires (or among people who imagine themselves the descendants of those empires). Turkey, Iran, China, and Russia at the very least are all waiting for or working towards a world where territorial acquisition by conquest is the norm.
iamsanteri 3y ago
I suspect things may be a tad simpler than discussed in this essay, even when most of it is compelling and rings true. I want to highlight that the main difference in my opinion is, and always was, that of attacking versus defending. Attacking is more often a clusterfuck of complexity and a constant process of messing up as opposed to defending a territory. When attacking you must have that critical 3:1 or 5:1 ratio in all aspects of employing your force, and it’s expected that mistakes will be made, losses will accrue and even grander failures will abound along the way. I would claim that even the Russians eventually adapt, albeit rather slowly, and so does anyone else. It’s about morale, motivation and will, and here it is likely that defenders have an upper hand. In short, when attacking, be ready for a hell of a suffering in almost any case, except for when you have a hundredfold superiority in all facets of warfare, or alternatively, if you have stellar intelligence capabilities and the benefit of surprise when your enemy least expects it. And I’m not even talking about maintaining order after you’ve conquered a territory…
telotortium 3y ago
A book-length critique of the idea that the "long peace" means that the world in general has gotten more peaceful: Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age by Bear F. Braumoeller[0]. I came across the book recently, and it argues that we won't be able to statistically tell if the world is in fact getting more peaceful for about a century. The incidence of war as well as the number of dead doesn't seem to have appreciably decreased on average for the past two centuries, on a worldwide scale. It's true that there hasn't been a war as destructive as World War I and II since then (although the Iran-Iraq war rivals those in terms of number of deaths divided by the population of the combatant nations), but there's no particular reason to conclude that wars that kill so many people won't happen again. It was quite convincing and sobering to me. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Only-Dead-Persistence-War-Modern/dp/0190849533 https://www.amazon.com/Only-Dead-Persistence-War-Modern/dp/0...
- soared 3y ago
  I thought that WW 1 and 2 killed x% of the world/us population and that the current ME wars are not at that same scale, is that incorrect?
  - telotortium 3y ago
    Not the current wars, but the Iran-Iraq War, which was in the 1980s and was a WWI-style trench clusterfuck.
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
What I find interesting specifically with Russia-Ukraine is that the Russian Offensive is NOT producing a modern capable military. They are just throwing bodies. Ukraine however, will have the second best trained and seasoned military in the world with top NATO weaponry, and is building a national identity. It may be wringing corruption and ineffectual leadership from the civilian government, will have DEEP ties with elite western militaries from training relationships, and will prove themselves as a good investment for Western foreign aid. Ukraine may or may not get all its territory back, but Russia has, strategically, utterly lost this war. THey wanted a buffer satellite state, and instead have the second most capable NATO military a couple hundred miles from their capital. Also, I suspect that Belarus will flip to a similar relationship with the West in the next 10 years / when Putin dies. It will be surrounded by Ukraine and the Baltic states, and Lukashenko is already in a tenuous position.
wly_cdgr 3y ago
I have no idea whether this person knows what they're talking about, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading that.
sharikous 3y ago
I am curious for one if the long peace is passing the test of time in the last two years. Not only the Russia-Ukraine war is threatening to spiral out, but also there has been a very bloody war in Ethiopia. We are not at WWII levels of warfare, obviously, but I wonder where we are compared to the '80s or the '50s
- alexeldeib 3y ago
  There's some interesting data/discussion on this out there. Not sure if we'll get updates through 2023 for some sources. https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace https://www.un.org/en/un75/new-era-conflict-and-violence https://www.un.org/en/un75/new-era-conflict-and-violence https://oneearthfuture.org/news/there-really-evidence-decline-war https://oneearthfuture.org/news/there-really-evidence-declin...

268 points by gabythenerd 3y ago

> But because the leaders of a country like Venezuela know that, they may well try to avoid developing their country into such a weak state in the first place. Sure, bribery and corruption are fun, but only if you live long enough to use it; it’s not worth ruining the economy if the only consequence is being killed when Brazil, Colombia or the United States invades. Interesting read but the above point is moot. History features many selfish leaders letting their kingdom, fief, colony, what have you fall into exactly that state of affairs. And when they were occupied, as often as not, the leadership was left intact so long as the tribute did flow. This is true from the ancient world up to through the 20th century. > This is why, I’d argue, you see the proliferation of failed states globally: in the past it would be actively profitable for non-failed states to take advantage of them Sure, there may be more independently standing "failed states" but occupation by a "more competent" power was rarely a corrective. These largely just became failed vassals. The little bit of bureaucratic support imposed by the occupier usually had the effect of depriving locals of the experience of self development and coordination and thus deepening and prolonging the crises within. > I should note I find this version of the argument, based on incentives and interests more compelling than Steven Pinker’s version of the argument based on changing cultural mores. > The value of the oil and other resources would be less than the cost of maintaining control of the country. The reasons that managing such a country would be too costly now vs in the past are almost purely cultural. Treating an occupied place like a colony has diplomatic and internal consequences for the occupier (not enough in my opinion but much more than in the past). And much more importantly, the cultural inventions of nationalism and total insurgent warfare have made it much harder to maintain an occupation. Yes, there were insurgencies in the past but the cultural expectation that hundreds of thousands or even millions of people will live in craters, subsist on worms and rats, forgoe medicine, endure exposure, hunger, pain and trauma for years or decades or even generations to guarantee self rule. The cultural invention of nationalistic mass resistance depends on technological innovations. You need modern small arms and explosives to make every cell of 20 or so fighters a threat which can't be ignored by an occupier. You need modern communication to coordinate these cells. And of course the value of this cultural invention is in its ubiquity. So you need an era of sentimental propaganda that depends on modern mass media to disseminate it. Ultimately technology and culture are not separate things. They shape each other as they develop and sometimes they are one in the same.

droopyEyelids 3y ago

Its not the main point of the article, but it made me wonder if finance is the new way “war” (predatory struggle for ownership & control) is waged in today’s world

karmakaze 3y ago
Finance is man-made. Resources are real. But the point makes sense in that it's a main point of competition with sports being another.
- michaelt 3y ago
  Finance may be man-made. But 200 years ago for a rich country to obtain a poor country's natural resources they had to invade an army and add it to their empire; while in the modern age, the rich country can swap the natural resources for pieces of paper they can print at will. Why bother to invade under such circumstances?
- n3v3r3v3r 3y ago
  Man-made things are real! Finance is the lazy abstraction we use to represent "resources." Competition also does not exist for competitions sake, it exists as a result of multiple agents within a specific context engaging in activity that has "winners" and "losers" (this is not a great way to put this but I'm trying not to think too hard about the specific theoretical nuances of what competition _is_, but more what it's used _for_). For sports, this context is highly constrained to whatever game is being played and so its impacts are limited to the scope of that game and those involved with its orchestration/spectacle (definitionally!). On the other hand, global trade is unconstrained by a specific range of activity (there are states with laws that try and combat this but ultimately money is money). This is much closer in effect to the "real" physical violence of war. By controlling an entity financially, you control that entities ability to exist in a financial context and so when that world of finance becomes the dominant form of interaction you are effectively enacting violence upon and limiting the expression of that thing (i.e. the conquest and subjugation of people/land but with money instead of swords). In contemporary hyper-reality it is a common mistake to ascribe "unrealness" to things like money or the internet, in such a way that we can box out their effects from our understandings. Then, when those systems are employed to reinforce and/or expand existing hierarchies that layer of smoke and mirrors is able to effectively divert attention away from their _very real_ impacts. At the same time they become both non-things and the backdrop on which everything else exists. "Just turn off the computer" "Just don't purchase exploitative things" "Just do your own research" [Ad infinitum...] These bits of rhetoric shift the unfathomable inertia of Things™ onto the shoulders of the individual, be it a person, organization or state without recognition as to why that entity is doing the thing that it is doing in the context of everything else that is doing something around it. There is probably already a term for it but this seems to itself be a kind of logical fallacy ("ex homine"?) that collapses the scale of a problem down to the decision of an individual. Thus it enters the scope of opinion and so is unreal and unworthy of discussion or understanding. Nuance and complexity are shunted away systemically because complex solutions and understandings do not engage well with efficiency. Because things that are economically efficient are those things which can be spread through economics, even the ideas around what it means to be economic can be distorted by this effect in such a way to detach people further and further from reality while assuring them that they are the only ones that _really_ understand how the world works (in "economic" terms). It is a battlefield that is at war with all other battlefields--and it is winning.

A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago

"We have all noticed that the Russian military appears far less capable than we thought it was; frankly it seems incapable of even some of the very basic tasks of modern industrial armies engaged in conventional military operations." I wondered about that. For the record, I have zero evidence of this as reliable records are hard to find in that arena. Chechnya was Russia's bigger conflict and now, unlike Syria and few other spots, Russia's approach resembled anti-terrorist stance ( pop in for a quick action and hold a small group keeping tabs on things ). The societies that seem to have a handle on this are ones that currently do not have peace ( say Ukraine or Israel, where both deal with an enemy threat on a regular basis ). "Instead, the new incentive for most countries would be to build a military in a way that aims to minimize the political costs, rather than maximize combat power or even ‘security'." I am willing to agree on this one. There is a clear weariness in US for giving military even more money. I am seeing something similar in the old country and that is despite Russian aggression aimed at Ukraine. "Meanwhile, maximizing the army for repression means developing paramilitary internal police forces at scale (Rosgvardiya is an obvious example), which direct resources away from core conventional military; such security-oriented forces aren’t designed for a conventional war and perform poorly at it." The argument seems valid, but I am not entirely convinced. Secret police is not new to Russia and if any country has their apparatus working, it likely is Russia. If that is the case, it makes it difficult for me to believe that they do not have a working system that recognizes and gives some leeway, like any wars before that, to people doing the actual fighting ( like.. you don't put a front soldier in Gulag just because he openly says Putin is a dick ). That said, the argument does provide an explanation for Russia's failure. I am just not sure I agree though. "revanchist powers (Israel, Taiwan, Poland, Finland, Ukraine, etc.)" I found the listing of Poland and Finland interesting, but I am not sure what argument for keeping them on that list is. " Of course the big unanswered and at the moment unanswerable question is where countries like India or the People’s Republic of China fit." I am not sure it is unanswerable. Some people have definitely taken a stab at it. Right now, the momentum seems to be generating a new axis with both India and China rising as new powers and flexing their individual muscles ( we hear a lot about China, but that seems like it is mostly, because it is US's current main concern ).

jandrese 3y ago

GartzenDeHaes 3y ago

> Experience needs to be retained and institutionalized. Capable leaders need to be promoted and incapable but politically influential leaders sidelined. Also applies to government, business, and academia.

wolfram74 3y ago
But those organizations can have fitness pressure applied to them outside the context of hot wars. People love to make a big deal of the "fund N losers to find 1 winner" aspect of VC.

safety1st 3y ago

This stuff about the world being peaceful due to the industrial revolution doesn't make a lot of sense to me. For one thing, the IR significantly predated WW1 and WW2. It didn't prevent those, so how'd it cause the "long peace" afterwards? The predominant theory about this in international relations is hegemonic stability theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemonic_stability_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemonic_stability_theory - there have been several periods throughout history that were relatively peaceful because an exceptionally strong nation state decided to step up and enforce a peace. Considering that the US was half of global GDP at the end of WW2 and has long been more than happy to sanction anyone who conducts in an (unapproved) war (such as Russia right now), the modern era of "long peace" fits this theory pretty well.

georgeg23 3y ago
That theory ignores the Cold War, which hinged on M.A.D.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  Why do you say that?
- jdlshore 3y ago
  In what way? The fundamental argument is that war is less profitable than economic competition, which is exactly how the Cold War progressed, and why the US won. Edit: My mistake, I thought you were talking about Deveraux’s theory, but it looks like you were talking about the Economic Stability Theory OP mentioned.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    > The fundamental argument is that war is less profitable than economic competition, which is exactly how the Cold War progressed, and why the US won. So for countries that lose the economic competition, might war be a 'better' option?
    - 3y ago

georgeg23 3y ago

One of the less spoken but potentially significant reasons for Russia's invasion is that Putin felt the nuclear tables were about to turn with M.A.D. when the U.S. restarted Strategic Defense Initiative development. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative

scythe 3y ago
UCS statement on the establishment of the Space Force and attendant risks of a new arms race (2018): https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/space-based-missile-defense-0 https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/space-based-missile-defense...
- georgeg23 3y ago
  I agree with UCS, and even the threat of an SDI can lead to an arms race.

digging 3y ago

Still, reading, but I'm looking forward to this. I've read a lot of the author's other posts about things like military organization in LOTR and theory of history in Crusader Kings. I typically find the tone to be careful and nuanced but also engaging. I am likely unqualified to really determine the merits of a given argument in this article, but I feel confident I can trust the author to present them fairly.

ihm 3y ago

A lot of cogent analysis here, but I’m surprised the author doesn’t seem to know about the economic and political forms of warfare which the US has been pursuing as a cheaper alternative to conventional war. To use Venezuela as an example, the author says no one has tried to invade it (which is actually not even true, see below) but also the US has been imposing crippling sanctions for over 15 years in an attempt to punish the people and weaken the government. Moreover there was a US supported coup attempt in 2002 and one basically cooked up entirely by the US in 2020 (Operation Gideon). This was a plan to actually invade the country by boat with a small force to try to take control of the government. This is part of a pattern of behavior for the US in the 20th century. The book Washington Bullets does a good job cataloguing the various interventions of this form.

MostlyStable 3y ago
So, not to come off as "these are good things" or anything, but you have to be able to see that "economic warfare" is preferable to "warfare warfare", right? It would obviously be better to have neither, but if I have to pick one, I know which one I'm going to pick, and I don't think it's unreasonable to characterize a switch from traditional warfare to economic warfare as "more peaceful" or even just "peaceful".
- pphysch 3y ago
  You don't have to pick one. Venezuela has approximately zero capability to wage any flavor of warfare against the USA, and certainly didn't provoke the current hybrid war by threatening USA national security.
- 5040 3y ago
  >you have to be able to see that "economic warfare" is preferable to "warfare warfare", right? Economic warfare can resemble the sieges of traditional warfare. Yemen was blockaded "economically" to prevent food and medical aid from entering the country. Syrians were only getting an hour of electricity per day in recent memory because of economic strictures preventing them from importing oil. It can get pretty brutal.
3y ago

IceHegel 3y ago

The Grand Illusion II

photochemsyn 3y ago

This blog post has some curious blind spots that, if taken into account, negate most of its primary thesis about 'the long peace'. The focus of the post is two-fold: the recent outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, in truncated form (the war has been going on at a low level since 2014, with militia forces supplied by Russia and Ukraine fighting one another in eastern Ukraine throughout that period), and a recommendation for a book about a naval battle in World War II. Hmm... what about Vietnam and Iraq? This is pretty standard American exceptionalist propaganda-speak, as seen in corporate media and Hollywood: lots of material on WWII, and on today's conflict. It's obvious why neither Vietnam nor Iraq/Afghanistan are mentioned in the post, those being the largest post-war conflicts the US was involved in. The Vietnam War was in many ways the result of European colonial powers (France) to hold onto their colonial possessions post-WWII; the US could have supported Vietnam independence in 1945 but chose to allow France to try to seize control again, and then took over from the French under JFK's tenure, and spent about a decade killing Vietnamese people in a futile effort to keep the puppet South Vietnam government in power. There was also an element of Cold War proxy fight. The Iraq War is even less defensible; the WMD claims were deliberate lies concocted by the CIA on the orders of the Bush Administration and supported by the UK's Blair government. Basically a class A war crime. Similarly, the debacles in Afghanistan (NATO-backed), and Libya (NATO-backed) don't get any scrutiny. As far as nuclear weapons, well, they haven't stopped war, just pushed the conflicts into various proxy wars, as seen in the India-Pakistan border region. The architects and profiteers of war don't want to get nuked themselves, though they are quite happy to send kids off to die in these conflicts, so nuclear weapons are somewhat stabilizing, barring some accident or other.

reducesuffering 3y ago
The blind spots are entirely your own. The very first paragraph of the article includes: "the period since WWII which has had a low and indeed falling level of war, both inter-state and intra-state. Normally, when I say this is something that has happened, I find I encounter a great deal of incredulity among the general public. Surely they can list off any number of wars or other violent conflicts that happened recently. But the data here is actually quite strong (and we all know my attitude towards certainty on points of real uncertainty; this is not one of them) – violence has been falling worldwide for nearly 80 years, the fall has been dramatic and relatively consistent." > standard American exceptionalist propaganda-speak "the USA’s record as a neighbor to Central and South America is not one we ought generally to be proud of"

avgcorrection 3y ago

> I’ve discussed this before a few times, but I think Azar Gat is probably right to suggest that the long peace is itself a consequence of the changing incentives created by the industrial revolution and to an even greater extent, by nuclear weapons. Prior to the industrial revolution, war was the best way to get rich (if you won) because land and conquered subjects were so much more valuable than any kind of capital investment (infrastructure, manufacture, tools, etc.) that could have been developed with the same resources. The industrial revolution changes this, both by making war a lot more destructive (thus lowering returns to successful warfare)1 while at the same time massively raising returns to capital investment in things like infrastructure, factories and tractors. It suddenly made more sense, if you coveted your neighbors resources, to build more factories and buy those resources than to try to seize them by force. Nuclear weapons in turn took this same effect and ratcheted it up even further, by effectively making the cost of total war infinite. I’m getting such Beltway Think Tank vibes for some reason.

jameshart 3y ago
Well sure - this is just fairly conventional international relations theory. Trying to apply systems thinking to the question of ‘why conflict’ is basically the entire academic discipline of international politics and strategic studies. This particular take is basically a standard neorealist perspective on how to explain the impact of globalization in reducing conflict. Basically allowing that trade changes the playing field, without allowing that states might be anything other than selfish entities, or that there might be any relevant entities to consider in international affairs (like nonstate actors, cultural power, etc). Other schools of IR theory take different perspectives, but neorealism is basically the foundational view of western foreign policy.
safety1st 3y ago
Honestly another thing I didn't like about this peace was the "Russian army is weak so maybe lots of other armies are weak" idea. That's the last thing we need the chickenhawks running DC to believe
- noduerme 3y ago

JacobiX 3y ago

Another possibility for the period of relatively long peace is the modern equivalent of The Pax Romana. For reference Pax Romana, describes a 200-year era in the Roman Empire from 27 B.C.E. to 180 C.E. This timeframe marked a significant phase of peace and remarkable economic growth achieved through hegemony. The US has the biggest economy and the largest military spending by far.

pclmulqdq 3y ago
Other periods of peace have shown up in history when one empire is the undisputed hegemon of the known world. The pax brittanica is another example, as are several periods in Chinese history. We are living in the pax Americana right now, but it is unclear how long that will last.
nerdponx 3y ago
Rome was still actively campaigning on its borders and violently suppressing revolts in the provinces during that time period. But it probably felt very peaceful from the perspective of (middle- and upper-class) Romans, especially in contrast to the constant warfare and chaos of the centuries before and after.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- telotortium 3y ago
  Not so different from the US, really. I'm sure Middle Easterners speak of the "Pax" Americana in sarcastic tones.
throwawayPAX 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Americana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Americana
CRConrad 3y ago
> Another possibility for the period of relatively long peace is the modern equivalent of The Pax Romana. “Another” than what? This was exactly what TFA was about.

newuser94303 3y ago

I think that Globalization has increased the costs of war. You don't want to attack your suppliers. I also think that China is probably a paper tiger on offense but they are trying not to look like an easy target on defense. Most of their recent battles have been fist fights in the Himalayas. Deglobalization is an attempt to make war feasible because some strong countries feel like they are losing economic war and want to fall back on real war.

marianatom 3y ago
here's the thing, humanity got lucky. there was a nonzero chance that china and the dictatorships could have triumphed. if China didn't botch the chance to overtake US in 2008 with a capable dictator. if China got its hands on many advanced US military technologies. if Russia didn't botch the Ukraine invasion. if covid didn't have a vaccine, except one that China developed. I'm sure most of us are aware of the gulags that China ran in 2022, in the most prosperous city like Shanghai, with welded doors, lack of food, arbitrary killing of pets, moving their own citizens against their wills to camps or cells with no running water and unsanitary conditions. with cries in tall buildings from families in the middle of night for food. If. you haven't seen these things, go watch it online. Imagine if somehow China succeeded, and that's most of humanity's fate.
- wazer5 3y ago
  Wow you should visit China though, it's great. I feel for those who don't get to experience the benefits of globalization.
  - marianatom 3y ago
    lol, how presumptuous. I have visited China in 2007, before it turned authoritarian/dictatorship. I would not visit China again to support the dictatorship. I can visit any number of democratic countries like Taiwan. I feel for those who don't get that they are supporting evil. Btw, speaking of evil, China isn't giving up yet (Xi still have 10-20 years to live. free organ transplants from young Chinese, you know. high ranking politicians get them for free). It is producing destroyers at a massive rate, and will exceed # of destroyers that US has by 2040. Combined with the millions of disposable unemployed single young men, and there's still a chance that Taiwan would overwhelmed. and if Taiwan falls, the same strategy can be used to conquer Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Australia.

noduerme 3y ago

>> " What is [sic] – quietly, because they haven’t tried to launch a major invasion recently – most militaries are probably similarly incapable of the basic tasks of industrial warfare?" This premise is delusional. The Russian military may have degraded, but the war in Ukraine shows clearly that the only aspect of warfare that has significantly changed since WWII is the vastly increased efficiency in targeting weapons payloads. Which can be unwound at any moment when smart munitions run thin. The idea that today's conscripts are less willing to fight than those in 1940 is ludicrous. Neither wanted to fight and both were ignorant blobs / yobs. The long peace has been sustained only by mutually assured destruction. That construct has not been slowly undermined by any determined wish for unity contrary to it on the part of the people living under the regimes which are yoked into that system. There is every indication that disrupting that system would lead to one party or another committing a nuclear holocaust, so therefore the balance of terror (including Putin's repression of Russians) must be preserved at all costs.

FpUser 3y ago
>"The long peace has been sustained only by mutually assured destruction" I tend to agree. Well, relative piece, as smaller wars are still constant feature.
JacobThreeThree 3y ago
>We have all noticed that the Russian military appears far less capable than we thought it was; frankly it seems incapable of even some of the very basic tasks of modern industrial armies engaged in conventional military operations. It's an unfalsifiable premise because the performance of the military is compared against a nebulous "less capable than we thought it was" bar, which by all accounts was clearly, albeit in hindsight, an incorrect worldview where Russia was supposedly going to conquer all of NATO in Europe in 3 days: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a21344/us-claims-russia-could-defeat-nato-in-60-hours/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a21344/us-...

KineticLensman 3y ago

> For those unfamiliar with the concept, the ‘long peace’ is a term we apply to the period since WWII which has had a low and indeed falling level of war, both inter-state and intra-state. There's an alternative view is that there was a long war essentially from the beginning of WW1 to the collapse of communism [0]. The so-called long peace also included the Korean War, the Vietnam war, various Arab-Israeli conflicts. I've seen it stated that there were only in fact a few days of peace in the entire 20C: the very brief period between Japan's surrender in August 1945 to the start of conflict that gradually ramped to the Vietnam war, when an Anglo/French force supported by rearmed Japanese took on the Viet Minh[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shield_of_Achilles:_War,_Peace,_and_the_Course_of_History#Long_War_(20th_century) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shield_of_Achilles:_War,_P... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Vietnam_(1945–1946) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Vietnam_(1945–1946)

jamesgill 3y ago

"Normally, when I say this is something that has happened, I find I encounter a great deal of incredulity among the general public." No, not just the general public; the 'long peace' is a hotly contested idea amongst academic and professional circles too. And, it's arguably a rather large amount of hand-wavey bullshit trying to paint certain nation states in a particular light and narrowly define 'war', 'peace', and 'violence'.

bendbro 3y ago
> And, it's arguably a rather large amount of hand-wavey bullshit trying to paint certain nation states in a particular light and narrowly define 'war', 'peace', and 'violence' tl;dr lefty academics disagree?

akkartik 3y ago

My only quibble with this article: it fails to apply its own conclusions to the US. The balance of evidence (Pentagon procurement processes and cost overruns of major projects) shows the US military too has a significant paper component.

pdonis 3y ago
Where does the article claim this is not the case?
- akkartik 3y ago
  For one, it's alluding to other countries but not really holding up the US in much of the article. Second, this quote at the end: > Consequently, I suspect Russia is not the only paper tiger out there; the forest is likely to be full of them.. the exceptions are likely to be.. or because they form the backbone of an international system which requires that someone carry a big stick (the United States).
  - pdonis 3y ago
    Ah, I see; you're not sure the big stick is actually as big as the article assumes. Yes, fair point.
AbrahamParangi 3y ago
While possibly true, the US has been nearly continuously engaged in conflict somewhere in the world since WWII.
- akkartik 3y ago
  Hence the word "component". It certainly seems more real than other paper tigers.

pphysch 3y ago

This article is based on the flawed premise that the Russia-Ukraine war was overwhelmingly one-sided in Russia's favor, eliding the fact that Ukraine had, over nearly a decade, amassed the next largest land army in Europe, trained by NATO, armed by NATO, guided by NATO intelligence, and side-by-side with Western PMCs. In many aspects, they were peer competitors on the battlefield. The "paper tiger" argument would have made more sense had Russia unsuccessfully invaded Kiev in 2014. But a lot can change in 8 years. Yes, Russia has had the advantage in long-range strike capability, but they chose not to strike command centers early in the war (contrast with the surprise airstrike on Saddam Hussein's palace 20 years ago, which kicked off Washington's unprovoked invasion).

lisasays 3y ago
Amassed the next largest land army in Europe, trained by NATO, armed by NATO, .. Utter BS, both in terms of raw numbers and contextually -- in "eliding" the fact that they were invaded by a certain neighboring country in 2014. As you are perfectly aware. Please stop posting nonsense like this.
- pphysch 3y ago
  Yes, Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea induced NATO to heavily militarize Ukraine. Were you not aware of this? It was kept quiet, but not exactly secret. > Since Crimea was annexed in 2014, the U.S. and partner militaries have helped grow Ukraine’s forces from just over 100,000 troops to nearly 250,000 [in 2017]. Just since January, Capt. Christopher’s unit of 250 soldiers has added another 3,000 or so Ukrainian soldiers to Kiev’s ranks. https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2017/10/ukraine-us-trains-army-west-fight-east/141577/ https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2017/10/ukraine-us-trains...
  - lisasays 3y ago
    The language in your post (particularly where you say "over a decade") misleadingly suggests that there was significant buildup pre-2014. And that poor, frightened Russia has just reacting the way any country would, in response to this imagined buildup.

nerdponx 3y ago

I'm surprised to hear the author state that war is more destructive than in the past. Is that actually true? Certainly we are more capable of destruction than in the past, but modern millitaries have put a lot of effort into being less broadly destructive, unless they specifically intend to broadly destroy things. Photos of bombed-out cities in Syria are jarring, but even the worst devastation there doesn't look as bad as what we saw in WWII, WWI, or even the American Civil War. When is the last time a city was "sacked" or a countryside "pillaged"? When is the last time an entire city population was executed? If anything, it seems like war is much less destructive than it used to be, because weaponry and tactics are much more precise than they used to be.

pdonis 3y ago
> Certainly we are more capable of destruction than in the past That is what the article is referring to when it talks about war being a lot more destructive--that if we choose to wage a total war, like we did in WW II, we can potentially destroy a lot more than at any time in human history. But the article is arguing that that very fact has prevented countries from trying to wage total war, because the costs now greatly outweigh the benefits. So the actual destructiveness of actual wars has gone down. > If anything, it seems like war is much less destructive than it used to be, because weaponry and tactics are much more precise than they used to be. I think this is true, but it's also true that more precise weaponry and tactics also change the goals of war. You can't conquer a country, or reclaim a country that someone else conquered, with low-level targeted munitions. But you can do things like eliminate terrorist leaders or take out particular dangerous capabilities (like the Israelis bombing Iraq's Osirak nuclear weapons plants) without having a major impact on the rest of the population. This kind of change is exactly what the article is describing when it says that democracies now have an incentive to build a military not for fighting a conventional war but for "the kinds of actions which mitigate the harm caused by failed states" (of which terrorism is one).
mcguire 3y ago
"It is really quite hard for ancient or medieval armies to do meaningful long-term damage to an agricultural economy; farmers flee, crops are hard to destroy and in any case armies can’t do anything to the land itself. [...] Even a sustained collapse might mean something like only a 25% reduction in total production; by contrast Liberia lost 90% of its GDP in just six years of internal warfare from 1989 to 1995." Now, I could pick some nits with that: crops are not that hard to destroy. But that just results in a few years of famine. On the other hand, a proper counterexample would be the Thirty Years War, but I don't know what the actual long term consequences for the northern German economy were.

michaelt 3y ago

> What is – quietly, because they haven’t tried to launch a major invasion recently – most militaries are probably similarly incapable of the basic tasks of industrial warfare? I once read an article that argued in the absence of war, it's impossible to tell if a doctrine or commander is good or not. Maybe you've got five officers up for promotion. One officer wants to give soldiers high-tech equipment, a heads-up display in every helmet and a grenade-dropping drone in every backpack. One officer wants to train loads of soldiers as linguists, so they can win hearts and minds in any country they might occupy. One officer wants to focus on PR at home, as maintaining a steady supply of cash and adventurous young men is key to winning any conflict. One officer wants to cut bureaucracy and red tape, as every individual in a support function is someone not in a front-line function, and it's front line fighters that win battles. One officer thinks the important thing is physical conditioning and classic soldiering - Marching, marksmanship, long hikes carrying heavy backpacks. How do you decide who to promote, if it's 30 years since you were last at war and none of them has ever won a real battle?

distortedsignal 3y ago
How do you know which conflict you're going to fight next? Each of these commanders may be better suited to a different conflict. The commander who is competent in one conflict may be a buffoon in a different conflict. Even winning battles doesn't necessarily set up a commander for success. If your enemy changes between conflicts (say, going from a near-peer adversary to an insurgent adversary, a-la-Gulf War 1 -> Gulf War 2, or insurgency to near-peer, a-la Russia-in-Chechnya to Russia-in-Ukraine), radically different strategy, operations, and tactics are required. I think this goes a long way to explaining the old saying "everyone prepares to win the last war." It boils down to "this guy did good last time, he'll do good this time too" when what helped him the last time is a very specific way of thinking that is not applicable now. TL;DR: Responding to Change over Following a Plan
munificent 3y ago
Or, in software engineering terms, it's impossible to optimize code that you can't profile.

karaterobot 3y ago

The long post-war era of peace is due to a number of factors, but the one we don't talk about enough is that the U.S. spent untold trillions of dollars becoming a global police force. This may be the biggest factor. I believe it is certainly the prerequisite for any others to have had an effect. The problem is that the U.S. has a tiger by the tail: if they want to continue in this role, they'll need to step up spending to cold war levels to have a chance of taking on China. This has a tremendous cost, culturally and economically. If they don't, we'll see (as we are seeing) increased global disorder and rearmament by, for example, European and Asian powers. This will likely lead to more wars in the future. One thing I am certain of: humans didn't just spontaneously become peaceful after WWII. Some energy is being expended to maintain what passes for global peace, and that energy will have to continue being expended for any conceivable time scale.

bilbo0s 3y ago
This thinking is also kind of a problem in itself though right. I mean, even if there was no China. OK. Great. Now what? You've still got India giving Russia as many drones as Russia desires every month. Is India, or even South Africa for that matter, ever going to lose its ability to produce drones for Russia? No. The essential problem is that we live in a multi-polar world. Multiple nations can sustain themselves. Multiple nations can arm themselves. Multiple nations can exert influence in arenas that previously only the West could exert influence. China, the US, India, Russia, the EU. All of these power centers are realities, and they all sometimes have conflicting agendas. We're even reaching a point where they need each other less and less. In fact, the linkages in terms of, for example, global trade at times may be driving some of the problems. (See climate change.) I'm not sure we know how to operate in this world. We focus so much on one "adversary", and without fail, we end up in conflict with another of the global powers or civilizations. I think this is because of the strangeness of this environment to us. Ukraine is a good example. You could argue that we didn't even bother to understand India's position on this before we issued an edict regarding sanctions. An edict that India promptly ignored. That's kind of a tell tale sign that we didn't really understand the underlying environment. Worse, I'm not sure we even tried to understand it? Did anyone ever actually solicit India's input in any meaningful way? I'm not sure they did. So as long as that lack of understanding persists, I'm pretty sure we'll continue to stumble from one crisis to the next. None of which will be the crisis we plan for.

kajumix 3y ago

"Prior to the long peace, there’s little question what happens to a country like Venezuela, which is essentially a giant pile of barely guarded wealth: one – or several – of its neighbors would move in, oust the government and seize the territory and its valuable resources (oil, in this case)." While I don't advocate war and violence, I can't help think that such a hostile takeover of a poorly run country by another better run country can be perceived as creative destruction in capitalism. War is too costly now reassuringly, but the incentive of leaders to keep the country strong, economically as well as militarily, is much less. The fear of being wiped out by a neighbor may have kept leaders in check. Now that fear is gone, and nothing has replaced it yet. The optimist in me hopes that states abandon the pretense of being above markets. The fear we desire in those who run states, the fear that we hope will keep them in check, will be that of losing paying customers, their citizens, to other competitive jurisdictions.

Nasrudith 3y ago
The war has long been internalized in "Banana Republic" or "Resource Cursed" situations with coups. It has the same element of fear of being killed. Of course that also has different definitions of "poorly run" and "strong". "Not funneling enough oil money into the military's pockets." could count as "poorly run" and "military well under control" as "strong". Dictators tend to have shitty armies because they depend upon buying loyalty and/or setting up self-sabotaging hierarchies beneath them to stay on top. They are good enough to oppress their own populace just fine but tend to get their asses handed to them when they ill-advisedly attempt external use.

nitwit005 3y ago

> because it no longer makes economic sense to do so. The value of the oil and other resources would be less than the cost of maintaining control of the country That's always been the case. People used to just murder or enslave the populations they conquered. While you can get away with mass genocide and slavery internally, it has gotten far riskier to attempt such a thing against a neighboring state. It'll also destroy your status as a leader, when previously a violent conquest was often viewed as "glorious".

pdonis 3y ago
> That's always been the case. People used to just murder or enslave the populations they conquered. I don't understand. Murdering or enslaving the population of the conquered country is a lot cheaper as a way to maintain control of it. So the fact that it's a lot harder politically to do those things now, than it was in the past, greatly increases the cost of maintaining control of a country. As the article says.
- nitwit005 3y ago
  What's changed isn't the economics, it's what other leaders will do if you attempt it.
  - pdonis 3y ago
    I would say both have changed. The economics has changed because, even leaving out political factors, the benefit of invading a country has greatly decreased, because the kind of war you need to wage to invade a country now will destroy whatever wealth in that country you were hoping to gain by invading it. And the political factors have changed because previous ways of trying to reduce the cost of controlling a country will now trigger consequences (in the form of actions by other countries) that they didn't before.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  "Murdering or enslaving the population of the conquered country is a lot cheaper as a way to maintain control of it." Depends on what you need the country for. Nazis crushed the Czechoslovak state and executed any guerrillas caught fighting them, but they didn't mess with ordinary Czech workers, who were needed to keep the factories running. Mistreating qualified workers would decrease total industrial output and harm the German war effort.

Merad 3y ago

I thought I recognized the site. This the same author who wrote very detailed analysis of the Siege of Gondor and the Battle of Helms Deep from LOTR as well as articles about military and political topics from Game of Thrones, and many real-world historical topics. They're a military historian IRL and have a lot of content worth reading: https://acoup.blog/resources-for-world-builders/ https://acoup.blog/resources-for-world-builders/

akiselev 3y ago
Brett Devereaux (or Ollie, really) is very popular on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=acoup.blog https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=acoup.blog
syndacks 3y ago
Yea I thought the article was going to be about the military too but it opened up with a photo of a dog.

_8j50 3y ago

The important to note imo is the length of the period:80. A 17 year old 80 years ago is 97. The last of the generation that were alive during WW2 are dying. Putin himself grew up in the shadow of his brother who died in WW2. Those that knew war, kept peace. But now, especially with gen-z, there is less alarm and awareness of war. All the tech and military advancement mean war would be even more horrific and cruel but also as you can see in ukraine the usage of drones and remore controlled artillery is reshaping war. Keep in mind, the rules of war only apply to the loser. The wars most western people alive today are familiar with are fought in remote countries and between soldiers. If your homeland was threatened most of your people will support breaking every rule of war.

mikewarot 3y ago

The first time I heard Eric Weinstein call for periodic above ground nuclear weapons demonstrations[1], I thought it was nuts. That's because I grew up with the threat of the H-Bomb[2] and the impending nightmares that I've had ever since (though thankfully they are infrequent these days). Seeing how casually people dismiss the possible effects of a war involving 10,000 of these weapons has caused me to re-evaluate things. We should have am internationally sanctioned thermonuclear weapons demo every few years, at least once per decade, but less than annually. To remind everyone what's at stake. [1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/G23s5TX1QRM https://www.youtube.com/shorts/G23s5TX1QRM [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon

soperj 3y ago
Why not just play videos of previous demos as if it's news.
- mikewarot 3y ago
  Because, just like the moon landings, people will deny they exist at some point.
  - AlexandrB 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure that unless they witness it firsthand, the same people will deny it exists even with a live broadcast.
  - soperj 3y ago
    People still deny that the earth is round. Doesn't really matter about the demos going on. Question, do moon landing deniers deny everything due to space? like do they think that the current SpaceX stuff is all cgi? What about the space shuttle? Or is it literally just going to the moon that they don't believe in?
    - rad_gruchalski 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

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hackandthink 3y ago

Nassim Taleb's critique of the "long peace": "We investigate the theses of “long peace” and drop in violence and find that these are statistically invalid and resulting from flawed and naive methodologies, ..." https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf Our technology is smarter than our politics. We will be lucky if we don't blow up everything.

downWidOutaFite 3y ago

I see no mention of the UN in these discussions. The post-wwii international order has been maintained in large part thanks to the global agreement to recognize the UN as the venue to arbitrer large disputes. But there's a dangerous growing movement to denigrate the UN for various ideological reasons.

dirtyid 3y ago

Pinker's "long peace" theory with respect to global conflict is likely bad statistics - 20th-21st century under US military hegemony had a comparable if not higher number of conflicts, see Max Roser’s work documenting global conflicts over the past 600 years. What has changed is that war now is generally shorter and less deadly especially towards combatants, but that's more reflective of the pace of modern war enabled by modern weapons. High intensity wars don't last for 20+ years anymore because you can pretty much destroy nations in 1-5, and belligerents are quicker to exhaust and forced to settle. In aggregate war fatalities is down, but not # of conflicts. US hegemony didn't stop USSR and RU from warring in their periphery, nor PRC border skirmishes pre 90s when US had vast more naval power asymmetry. When countries want to fight for their interests, especially regional, they still do. Ultimately, US military dominance is good for US+LIO interests / serenity, but hard to extrapolate anything more. IMO multipolarity will increase the chance of "smaller" conflicts as poles assert their own interests for sure, but it's going to be around the baseline of conflicts that's consistently been simmering throughout history. The fear is increasing large-scale conflict between poles/blocks - ending the cyclic gap between major wars among major powers - but that's what happens when declining hegemon pushes their interests to the exclusion of others too intensely for too long.

hackandthink 3y ago

In the Ukraine conflict, I was surprised that the military is more reasonable than the politicians. (Vad and Kujat in Germany, Milley in USA). Who want's to fight? It doesn't seem to be the military.

iskander 3y ago

> But in a world where most invasions are – or at least ought to be – self-deterring, for countries that do not have revanchist neighbors who might launch a stupid war of conquest out of pique Seems a bit dismissive about the degree of revanchism in many former empires (or among people who imagine themselves the descendants of those empires). Turkey, Iran, China, and Russia at the very least are all waiting for or working towards a world where territorial acquisition by conquest is the norm.

iamsanteri 3y ago

I suspect things may be a tad simpler than discussed in this essay, even when most of it is compelling and rings true. I want to highlight that the main difference in my opinion is, and always was, that of attacking versus defending. Attacking is more often a clusterfuck of complexity and a constant process of messing up as opposed to defending a territory. When attacking you must have that critical 3:1 or 5:1 ratio in all aspects of employing your force, and it’s expected that mistakes will be made, losses will accrue and even grander failures will abound along the way. I would claim that even the Russians eventually adapt, albeit rather slowly, and so does anyone else. It’s about morale, motivation and will, and here it is likely that defenders have an upper hand. In short, when attacking, be ready for a hell of a suffering in almost any case, except for when you have a hundredfold superiority in all facets of warfare, or alternatively, if you have stellar intelligence capabilities and the benefit of surprise when your enemy least expects it. And I’m not even talking about maintaining order after you’ve conquered a territory…

telotortium 3y ago

A book-length critique of the idea that the "long peace" means that the world in general has gotten more peaceful: Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age by Bear F. Braumoeller[0]. I came across the book recently, and it argues that we won't be able to statistically tell if the world is in fact getting more peaceful for about a century. The incidence of war as well as the number of dead doesn't seem to have appreciably decreased on average for the past two centuries, on a worldwide scale. It's true that there hasn't been a war as destructive as World War I and II since then (although the Iran-Iraq war rivals those in terms of number of deaths divided by the population of the combatant nations), but there's no particular reason to conclude that wars that kill so many people won't happen again. It was quite convincing and sobering to me. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Only-Dead-Persistence-War-Modern/dp/0190849533 https://www.amazon.com/Only-Dead-Persistence-War-Modern/dp/0...

soared 3y ago
I thought that WW 1 and 2 killed x% of the world/us population and that the current ME wars are not at that same scale, is that incorrect?
- telotortium 3y ago
  Not the current wars, but the Iran-Iraq War, which was in the 1980s and was a WWI-style trench clusterfuck.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

What I find interesting specifically with Russia-Ukraine is that the Russian Offensive is NOT producing a modern capable military. They are just throwing bodies. Ukraine however, will have the second best trained and seasoned military in the world with top NATO weaponry, and is building a national identity. It may be wringing corruption and ineffectual leadership from the civilian government, will have DEEP ties with elite western militaries from training relationships, and will prove themselves as a good investment for Western foreign aid. Ukraine may or may not get all its territory back, but Russia has, strategically, utterly lost this war. THey wanted a buffer satellite state, and instead have the second most capable NATO military a couple hundred miles from their capital. Also, I suspect that Belarus will flip to a similar relationship with the West in the next 10 years / when Putin dies. It will be surrounded by Ukraine and the Baltic states, and Lukashenko is already in a tenuous position.

wly_cdgr 3y ago

I have no idea whether this person knows what they're talking about, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading that.

sharikous 3y ago

I am curious for one if the long peace is passing the test of time in the last two years. Not only the Russia-Ukraine war is threatening to spiral out, but also there has been a very bloody war in Ethiopia. We are not at WWII levels of warfare, obviously, but I wonder where we are compared to the '80s or the '50s

alexeldeib 3y ago
There's some interesting data/discussion on this out there. Not sure if we'll get updates through 2023 for some sources. https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace https://www.un.org/en/un75/new-era-conflict-and-violence https://www.un.org/en/un75/new-era-conflict-and-violence https://oneearthfuture.org/news/there-really-evidence-decline-war https://oneearthfuture.org/news/there-really-evidence-declin...