80/20 for defence

 

For years my go-to approach for deterrence & defence was tailored to the "NATO defends Baltic members against Russia" scenario with few exceptions, and I understand this may seem a bit overspecialised. The current art of war has many features different for different conflicts.

Key assumptions of that scenario were that

• Russian armed forces are not total crap, they have hidden aces up the sleeve
• Geographically close active army forces would need to respond very quickly to stem the tide in the first about two weeks
• Active armed forces from all over NATO would trickle in and leave Russian armed forces hopelessly inferior in-theatre
• No real mobilisation with newly-formed army formations would be necessary, as NATO is conventionally vastly superior to Russia.
  

I wrote a couple times that the 100% high end approach of modern armed forces is nonsense, armies were historically a mix of few high quality troops (say, knights) and vast majority of lower quality troops (sergeants, levies, squires). 1940 Germany had about 15% high quality divisions in its army and 85% infantry divisions that were not much different from WWI infantry divisions, and some of these were utter crap and good for no more than occupying or guarding coasts.

Ukraine's defence hows something similar; the active army and the active national guard formations existing since 2014 or 2015 (or some forerunner warband existing then) are the core of the land forces, but the bulk does not seem to be the mobilised territorial forces; overwhelmingly infantry and lightly equipped support forces.

I advocated for a volunteer militia that provides an expanded basic training to build a large pool of reservists in peace time despite a volunteer military. The biggest obstacle to this is an unhealthy fixation on peacetime strength of land forces when mobilised strength is what really matters.

The Pareto-ish 20% high 80% low mix proved successful because it's efficient in a world of scarce resources and sufficient motivation. 

The Ukraine War has shown that against today's Russian land forces it is very much possible to establish front lines and to survive sufficiently well in face of their artillery with an elastic defence in-depth. This piece of evidence changes much. It shows a path towards a much more cost-efficient and in fact much lower-cost NATO land defence. Yes, lower cost. To call for more military spending in the mightiest military alliance ever because the only serious threat is embarrassing and disarming itself in a war with a single secondary power is mindboggingly primitive, stupid, idiotic, illogical.

So basically we could reduce our active armies (Germany could easily make do with four well-rounded mechanised brigades, for example) and still provide the 20% "high expense" portion (the current paper tiger forces don't deserve to be considered high end). The 80% "low expense" portion could be 

(1) Militia infantry battalions (volunteers, maybe in frontier states conscripts) with 6 months of training for enlisted, 12 months for junior NCOs, 18 months for junior officers and senior NCOs and senior officers trained in active forces. This militia would at the same time provide the basic training and recruitment channel for the active army.

(2) Militia support regiments for certain support services with greater than 10 km radius of effect. These support regiments might include older (35+) militiamen, but more importantly it would require more specialised and centralised training. I still don't see why enlisted personnel would need more than 12 months of basic service for these, though.

These training time frames may seem alien to anyone who is used to how 'business' is done in our armed forces. They're not alien to students of military history. The Americans raised "90 day wonders" in WW2, 2nd lieutenants trained a mere 90 days. Germany understood in WW2 that proper infantry training requires six months, but it did send many recruits with only six weeks of infantry training to the front, later reduced to something like six days, but those were clearly useless. Medieval levies and renaissance mercenaries had mere months of training. Even 18th century regular army cavalrymen were supposed to be proficient after one season (six months; no riding in wintertime and until the underfed horses regained strength in spring) of training.

Do you know who is absolutely disgusted by this concept? Active army senior NCOs and officers whose paycheck and prestige depends on pretending that troops only become useful after two years of training and peacetime military strength is what they're interest in, not deterrence & defence.

Anyway, I may flesh out this idea in later blog posts, with some mentioning of hardware to make visible that the costs could indeed be kept very affordable.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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