The case for a second level between war and peace

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Germany knows three states of alarm as a nation; plain peace, crisis (mobilisation) and war. I will argue in favour of a fourth state here.

There are two reasons for the need for a fourth state of alarm:

1. There were brief but intense arms racing periods prior to both world wars (1912-1914, 1938-1939 and 1939-1941 for USSR, Japan and USA), and many other world wars.
2. Peacetime ways of procuring weapons and munitions are so clumsy one has to think in years, not months.

One might argue that -especially in the age of nuclear munitions- a counter-arms racing might increase instead of reduce the probability of war and that nuclear munitions make attempts to limit the damage done by an eventual war futile.

Still, there may be situations in the future when the government concludes that counter-armsracing is a good idea. The problem here is that we would be largely incapable of it due to problem #2.

A relatively simple and extremely cheap fix that could greatly help to  deter an arms race in the first place is to introduce a fourth state of alarm that deals with problem #2.

We could add to the constitution a fourth 'long duration crisis' state of alarm in which the executive branch would be able to command military procurement/services and civil defence procurement/services contracts onto businesses, said businesses would have their equity capital and labour compensation levels frozen (decrease of equity capital would be compensated by the government, increases would be taken by the government, no payments other than wages to shareholders) and all military/civil defence contracts would have total priority over all other contracts (to those it would be similar to force majeure cases).

These provisions would make it believable that we would indeed be good at arms-racing, despite many industry order books being so stuffed that they have no free capacity for months or years to come.

The costs would be a couple thousand work days for politicians and civilian staff members as well as the negligible cost of publication. It would be an almost free boost to deterrence.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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