A track record that needs no hiding

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I searched for an old blog post to quote and instead found a blog post-sized comment of mine (colouration added):

I covered Russia previously
http://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.com/2007/08/no-major-war-in-europe-in-next-ten.html
and as much as I like low military spending, it's a bit more complex than what you suggest.
I don't expect them to turn on us militarily in a few years (rather on Ukraine), but don't exclude it as a possibility.


First problem: Lags (a.k.a. initiative)
The reacting powers would react with a lag of about three years due to imperfect information collection, processing and distribution.

Second problem: Aggressor's timing advantage
An aggressor can plan ahead to be ready for war in year x (Hitler planned 1940 for basic readiness, 1944 for full readiness against Russia and 1947 for naval readiness against the UK).
He can ensure that his forces are fit at that time. A reacting power - no matter whether low or high expenditures in peacetime - is at a disadvantage.
High peacetime expenditures can even be a disadvantage, as the equipment will be older on average than the aggressor's (example France 1940 - it still had many WWI guns).

My conclusion (I wrote several blog posts around it) is that we need to be aware that conventional warfare is the only truly threatening one (besides genocidal nuclear warfare). Militias at the end of our world will never touch us much, they cannot invade us or cut our sea lanes. Conventional warfare deserves our attention.

Our policy as well as our armed services need to be fit to react quickly.
We need good education for the relevant politicians, a good cultivation of military competence (including a reserve of trained soldiers; basic infantry training suffices to save 6+ months of lag) and we need always competitive hardware designs.
That's more easily done by many incremental steps instead of 35-year- development and replacement cycles as usual for much of our hardware.

Finally, we need to prevent that these precautions take effect - we should prevent WW3. Reduce reasons for war, don't create new ones - and avoid wasteful arms races and wars.

Published in February of 2009. The typical contents of military blogs and military news were still dominated by the occupation war in Iraq at that time.

 

I can proudly state that I'm still 100% behind those statements and feel pretty good compared to most people who actually got paid in the 2009...2021 period for commentary or studies on military affairs.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

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