> “We want to be able to upgrade, advance [and] develop our capabilities ourselves, and as sovereign countries inside the partnership, each partner has that goal,” Commodore Moreton explained.
Is this flexibility really a worthy goal? I feel like it would be better for these countries to reduce the number of variables and work to scalably and cheaply build many of them. It doesn’t have to be one plane for every mission necessarily, but the ability to customize for each nation feels like a distraction rather than a feature.
Generally yes. If you have domestic defense contractors they can participate in various fitting and retrofitting programs without having to back engineer some of the SWaP[1] specs for the stuff the US defense contractors are making for the F35.
I also suspect it would help if you have air war doctrine differences with the US (like guns vs missiles as an example).
[1] Space, Weight, and Power. It defines the envelope within which the avionics and other gear have to operate.
Guns vs missiles is a bad example (missiles clearly won decades ago). It's more about eg. wanting to use a locally developed missile instead of using one of the US approved missiles (because missiles have to be tested, integrated, and approved to be used on an aircraft before you can actually use them, which can take years even before accounting for politics.)
The MDBA Meteor (European AMRAAM competitor, generally viewed as the best beyond visual range air to air missile (BVRAAM) currently) has been in service since 2016, but won't work on F-35s until ~2026. For comparison, it only took ~1.5 years to integrate the Meteor on UK Eurofighters.
I think it's because Britain in particular is desperate to get outside support for the programme whereas the Swedes and Japanese want to get access to technology but design their own aircraft.
So the only way to get them onboard is to make the association loose. I can't tell if this is good or bad - it might mean that the Swedes will make something affordable out of it and the rest will blow billions on various Golden Geese (is that the right term?).
There's some interesting Japanese technology - e.g. their AESA missile radars would go into the Meteor to bring it far out ahead of anything else. Also I think they have some ceramics in their fighter engines etc which are of high interest.
So they don't actually know what direction to take aircraft in and decided on stealth.
Seems reasonable, all else being equal, the party that is detected last has a higher chance of winning.
What happens when a new detection method is developed that makes these planes not stealthy? Don't you then just have 4-5th gen craft that cost 2-10x as much?
Guess it takes a real war to discover the actual winner of modern warfare.
Like the damn Zumwalt destroyers plans. Bunch of useless boomers in the mil complex full of their own hubris even after loosing to illiterate goat herders they keep coming up with this type of bullshit. I am just glad budgets are evaporating and these clowns are all retiring soon.
The Zumwalt class started out as a requirement from the armed forces committee in congress for a replacement for the old battleship Naval Gunfire Support mission. That is sit a bit off the coast and go boom with big guns to help the boots on the ground.
Just one wee little problem with that: anti ship missiles have made that a suicide mission since approximately the late 60s. And no, all the stealth in the world wasn't going to make a difference in that when a simple counter battery radar would spot you, not to mention other means.
The Navy tried to get out of it but couldn't, so we got stuck building 3 rather useless boats and then canceling the program. Some neat naval design and engineering went into them which may be useful in the future, but it wasn't worth it for the sticker price at all.
The people created this fuster cluck are the same folks that kept the battleships operational or semi operational post WW2 when it was clear they were obsolete, at non trivial cost to taxpayers.
Prime example of why military spending needs to be cut in half at least to focus on what's important. Not to weaken the military but to stop bullshit like this in its track.
Speaking of tracks, apparently production of M1 tanks is going at full pace, thanks to the factories being located in the districts of influential politicians. The military has no need for them though, so they are going straight to storage.
Despite, as far as I know, even the Army saying they don't want nor need these Abrams. Keeping the factories running is good, one never knows when that industrial base might needed at scale. and we no longer in the 40s when car factories could easily converted to tank production. You don't need full capacity production for that, so.
The ships float fine. There's a sort of internet forum meme about them having poor seakeeping due to the unusual tumblehome hull. That's 100% imagined by forum warriors. The boats have remarkable stability and superior seakeeping. That's not the problem with them at all. The problem with them is they they were designed for a mission that was boneheaded from the beginning, and that costs ballooned tremendously to build them.
The Navy's plan for them now is to convert them into missile boats for the new hypersonic missiles, if/when those are ready, so they main end up being somewhat useful eventually. But again, you'd not want to spend money the way we had to get to this result if you had some way to rewind the errors.
> the party that is detected last has a higher chance of winning.
Can that be what 'stealth' means? Sensing technology must be progressing faster than the ability to remain off-radar. Between satellites, internet connected mobiles and general improvements in radar technology I'm not sure that a stealth aircraft can be undetected.
Stealth isn't about being undetectable, stealth aircraft have always been detectable, the Serbs shot down a F-117 22 years ago, Iraqi search radars picked them up 30 years ago. But even though they are detectable they can make the enemy have to work harder.
Also, stealth should never work alone, it should work in coordination with non-stealth aircraft, drones and stand off jammers as a coherent whole. Detecting stealth aircraft is easy, detecting stealth aircraft against massive background noise from a wall of jammers while missiles and drones are going after your radars is a lot harder.
There's no hiding in space, US, Russia and China have all demonstrated abilities to destroy satellites. In a significant war between any of those three nations those satellites will be gone in a week, maybe even a day.
Like you say yourself, stealth isn't a binary thing, but rather a set of techniques to reduce the detection range.
You can be assured that Russia and China are working hard on technology to detect stealth planes (e.g. multistatic radar systems). But again, it's not a binary thing. Even with a multistatic radar setup, a stealth aircraft will have lower detection range than a non-stealthy one. And considering both China and Russia are developing stealthy aircraft like Su-57 and J-20, it seems they themselves are not thinking that they have the magic technology that would make stealth obsolete.
This doesn't seem especially wrong to me. There were a lot of horses after the cavalry era was over, and the cavalry era was over long before the generals realized it.
The next war is going to be a drone (low-intensity) and hypersonic missile (high-intensity) war... it's not going to look like Top Gun.
I'm far from an expert but given the timeliness and complexity of 5th generation fighters I'm sceptical this could be operational by 2035 unless there have already been significant work or it's more of an iterative generation.
By the time all is said and done the drones of the NeoOttoman empire would have long taken over Europe. I for one am totally looking for the looming Caffa reboot.
1) Get the money. DOD likes to talk about future contracts. Nothing is real until contract is signed
2) Keep the money. DOD likes to cost sharing where the contractor has to pay the Military for the things they were already going to do, facilities that already exist, etc
3) Get more money. A contract just sets you up for winning the next contract
How is this affected by the new pact between US, UK, and Australia? The news here made it appears as that caused some bad blood between EU and the US/UK.
I can’t remember a single military project involving France and the UK that didn’t end up with them parting ways. From NATO, for a while, to eurofighter/rafale
That doesn't affect the EU as a whole. Sweden is skeptical about giving EU that role anyway, they're working for closer strategic ties to the US, and have signed agreements to that effect. They already chose Patriot over a German/French project for air defense.
They've never been team players. Don't forget they were happily building Nazi tank parts in WWII while playing nice with the allies. On the other hand, many EU countries have picked US fighters over Swedish offerings like the Gripen. It does go both ways.
I'd love to see the EU more militarily independent from the US. Especially because they tend to start wars for economic reasons. Sponsoring the military industrial complex, oil reasons.. In Europe we view the military more as defense and not as a geopolitical or economical tool. We also view joining the military more as a job and less as a duty to our country. But if EU countries start opting out it'll never happen.
We can still be friends with the US, but less military ties would be appreciated IMO.
> They've never been team players. Don't forget they were happily building Nazi tank parts in WWII while playing nice with the allies.
Please tell me what they could have done instead, being locked between a nazi-occupied country (Norway), one at war and partially occupied by the Soviets (Finland) and with a military monster to the south.
Sweden had to play nice or risk being squashed like a bug. Pretty much the same Switzerland ended up doing.
Understood, I never really got why the Nazis left Sweden alone but did go after Norway and Denmark. And at the same time were so hell-bent on conquering the empty deserts in North Africa.
But those ball bearings and other parts helped kill a lot of allies.
> Understood, I never really got why the Nazis left Sweden alone but did go after Norway and Denmark.
And at the same time were so hell-bent on conquering the empty deserts in North Africa.
Because Sweden had a credible military. Not that she could have resisted indefinitely to a German invasion, but subduing her would have taken time the Axis did not have.
> And at the same time were so hell-bent on conquering the empty deserts in North Africa.
Sweden was neutral. Britain and Free France weren't.
> But those ball bearings and other parts helped kill a lot of allies.
Poland was an ally. It was split between Germany and the Soviet Union (and sold off to the Soviets after the war, but that was yet to come). Do you think Sweden should have sacrificed herself after seeing that?
If you are going to create an expensive, outdated when first created machine in an effort to create jobs... why not create jobs and solve an actual need / problem at the same time.
Because otherwise some of the stealth fighter engineers go to China and there's a chance you get stealth-fightered. Or that's what I think the argument usually is.
This is a tired argument, and slightly hypocritical. Usually, the same people are proponents of not-so-useful but indirectly beneficial science projects and space exploration. But when it comes to military, the same reasoning gets thrown out of the window. Defense is a necessary evil and history has shown that things go from peaceful to high-tension heated global theater in no time. The inertia of training people to defend the nation or a group of nations is too large. Posture avoids conflict, the whole point of doing these military exercises.
I think all aspects of doing things that private enterprises or free market economy cannot simply afford should be maintained. From how nuclear weapons work to sending probes to Venus to smashing protons. The brain power needs to be fed with regular annual maintenance. It shouldn't be a partisan circus. This is an actual need / problem. Sure, the feeding frenzy can get the MIC to show the dark side of capitalism, let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.
This is a valuable point. I know you're right but I still find myself bristling at some of the defense projects that don't seem necessary to me. But there is value in maintaining the expertise and processes.
It’s not an either-or proposition. It’s possible to have a reasonable offensive (& defensive) capability while not spending so eye wateringly much on the MIC.
Your argument overlooks the many examples of utterly wasteful military spending that happens even against wishes of the military itself because the spending itself really is the focus over the actual military effect. So we could easily compromise between our PoVs and let you have all the military might you want - even if US might already peaks over the next few countries together (and looking at Afghanistan, Iraq, how is it even used?) - but you could still cut a lot of the pork.
I think things might get a bit crazy in the next century with climate change creating a lot of additional pressure, so I don't mind living in a well-armed Western Bloc, but that does not mean I have to ignore the incredible waste. I remember a Youtube summary/satire about the Bradley vehicle development, as an example for how it works (although it really shouldn't): https://youtu.be/aXQ2lO3ieBA --- and that is before senators get involved who are concerned about getting and keeping spending for their state.
US is absurdly ahead in fighter development that countries need to pool together to develop alternative or be wholey dependant for foreseeable future. There's also political / tehcnical strings to using US fighters, which are dominating market and pushing out other manufacturers while US is historically also extremely stingy on tech transfer for joint developments. UK/JP/IT running F35. Sweden/UK/JP all have industrial knowledge. US also focusing on NGAD system which might be too finicky for export. There's a vaccuum and market for alternative. These are also countries who can't procure from PRC / Russia.
However, I would expect drones to be reusable and not of the self-destruct type like a cruise-missile, so that you get at least those drones back that were not shot down, and/or have them attack more than only a single target.
Sweden has reusable torpedos. Most torpedos can be tested, but Sweden’s are routinely testable and that’s a very different capability. And as the torpedos become more autonomous, they become drones that can act like torpedos if the opportunity presents.
Similar parallels can be drawn to the Iranian attack on Saudi refineries recently. The line between cruise missiles and drones blurred.
So, yes, there is a move towards cruise missiles being chassis you can task with routine intelligence gathering, picket etc and even launching stand-off ordinance.
People don't seem to understand that we mount missiles on expensive jets because jets can travel thousands of miles and must not be shot down before they reach their destination.
When people talk about how they can build lethal drones for $100 or something they assume that you can launch the weapon 3 miles away from the target and that the target has already been spotted.
It's like saying that a million dollars can kill a million people because bullets cost less than $1. Making the bullet is the easy part. You still have to deliver it to the target.
I can’t stand those “$100 lethal drone” people dumping same story over, starting off by describing rocket artillery and derailing into strategic bombing all while maintaining it’s all enabled by battery prop toy drones. WTF they have their brains for!
That sounds really cheap, source? I was expecting maybe 10m (still a drop in the ocean). At 1m a pop you can fire a 1000 a day a still only be at 1billion/day
In 2015 the United States planned to procure 7,474 rounds with a FY2015 total program cost of US$1.9341 billion at an average cost of US$258,777 per unit.[6] By 2016, unit costs were reduced to US$68,000 per round
Italy - believe it or not - has top notch expertise in producing military and space technology. I recall they also export lots of military equipment, of all types.
As TFA points out, there's a competing French-German-Spanish 6th gen fighter project, FCAS. FCAS is apparently already in some kind of trouble due to conflicting requirements. The French want a follow-up to the Rafale, that is a carrier-capable, multi-role plane with long-range strike capability, crucially including nuclear strike. The Germans want none of that, they want primarily an air defense fighter.
Sweden is producing its own domestic fighter jets to this day (Saab Gripen). It’s latest generation was unveiled in 2017. So they have the experience but my assumption is that developing a next gen fighter is just too expensive and wasteful for such a small country.
Dassault doesn't work well in collaborative projects. Germany keeps saying that it will buy lots of aircraft to get a large workshare then scales back the real order.
The next generation of bullshit military spending?
A trillion for Afghanistan and F-35 each. Jeez, what could we have built with $2 trillion in investments? What cool companies, technologies or infrastructure could have sprung from this?
As I understand, that $tn for F35 is projected over the entire lifespan of the program, which is decades in the future. Not the sum they spent on development.
"Tempest will be able to fly unmanned, and use swarming technology to control drones. It will incorporate artificial intelligence deep learning and carry directed-energy weapons. The aircraft will have a Cooperative Engagement Capability which is the ability to share data and messages with other aircraft and coordinate actions. Tempest will feature an adaptive cycle engine and a virtual cockpit shown on a pilot's helmet-mounted display. A generator that delivers "unprecedented levels" of electrical power has also been developed for the aircraft."
>>A generator that delivers "unprecedented levels" of electrical power has also been developed for the aircraft.
Someone at MOD has finally learned... "what do you mean you can't move the ship and turn the radar on at the same time".. "what do you mean you can't fit catapults because there's nothing to power them".. etc etc etc
War is in part an expression of technological competitive advantage. Nth generation weaponry is expensive because technology requires the best minds, materials, and facilities that money can buy.
But what if for the same money, or less, we could buy something even better?
How much does peace cost?
Has anybody ever costed it?
For example, what could $2 trillion have bought in Iraq, Portland, or Jerusalem if it had been intelligently deployed for peace instead of war?
I know there is no handbook for peace, whilst there is a whole military industrial complex for war.
But what if smart people with budget built tools for peace?
I’m not saying the design, engineering, and deployment of these tools would be easy, obvious, or quick. But what if smart people built them, and, once built, they could scale?
I looked into this a few years back and the cost/benefit of the initial use of atomic weapons is not as cut and dried as many people believe. That's not really the topic here though.
It's absolutely true that weapons can be tools for peace, but I don't think that is how the projects in Afghanistan and Iraq played out. Even with the best intentions the fact that it is a military operation planned by military leaders and staffed by trained military personnel means that you're going to get particular kinds of approaches.
I think the suggestion is to approach these projects as an equivalently resouced mission with different aims and led by different people and to see if the balance of resources they would choose would be different.
The US uses war to export its domestic issues abroad. War is the primary conduit and excuse for corporate welfare.
Some of this goes into jobs. Occasionally - exceptionally, and less often than most people realise - some of it spins off into useful civilian tech.
But most of it is just free money for nothing much to not very nice people. Some of whom use it to buy political influence. And some of whom use existing political influence to make sure they benefit from it personally.
It's a perfect circle of corruption and moral decay built on foundations of death and terror.
You need to trust the other party in order to have a shot at peace. There is no trust due to historical reasons. War also directly benefits a lot of people and industries so they would never want that.
The last 70 or so years have been the most peaceful in human history. How? The American military and economic hegemony. If you want peace, build more aircraft carriers.
History. Human nature. The state as leviathan. Sometimes causation is correlated.
When nukes came into play, the consequences of violating the peace became too much for any sane state to countenance. The US used nuclear superiority to take on the role of global leviathan.
Despite missteps, it used its monopoly on violence as a very big stick that's allowed for a very lengthy peace. If certain idiot regimes keep playing stupid games, we're going to see what happens when the nuclear stick gets used, unfortunately. That might ensure a century or so of peace, if everything doesn't die.
I think it's more likely that WW1 and WW2 collectively persuaded even the most thick-headed of western elites that great power conflicts are bad for everyone, even the winners.
There's a reason why the french and the british were so reluctant to start WW2 - the first world war was completely devastating to their societies, and it didn't even improve their security, since Germany was able to relatively quickly rebuild and rearm.
> The last 70 or so years have been the most peaceful in human history.
IRAQ WAR (2003-2011)
WAR IN AFGHANISTAN (2001-PRESENT)
GULF WAR (1990-1991)
VIETNAM WAR (1959-1975)
KOREAN WAR (1950-1953)
This is ignoring an entire array of coups, rebellions, brutal suppressions and subjugations encompassing basically every country in South America
The last 70 years have only seemed peaceful because your the one doing the genocide this time around. Most of the rest of the world would like you to chill.
There have been other periods of global peace caused by domination of a single power, no one else argues that it was a good thing for everyone else involved.
I could try and argue India is now a better place because the period know as Pax Britannica almost gave them the toilet but you'd rightly consider me a mad man.
Do you think any of the places listed above were improved by being turned in to weapon testing ranges?
"This entry presents an empirical perspective on the history of war and peace. We also published a data visualization history of human violence here on OurWorldInData.org which presents empirical data showing that we are now living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence."
I appreciate the argument, and it holds merit, but I also think that the H-bomb is such a key difference. It’s essentially a stalemate, whereas other periods of non-war* have arisen out of absolute conquest.
* Non-war, I think, is a less charged term here, “peace” sounds like an unmistakably good thing, which it isn’t necessarily — or at least there is a long debate to be had about that as well.
Both the Korean war and the Vietnam war were a reply to Communist invasions, so China was at fault.
The Gulf war was a reply to Hussein occupying Kuwait and attempting to occupy the entire Middle East.
The early AFGHANISTAN war was a reply to Al Qaeda.
The Iraq war was to finish the hunt for Hussein.
Except for the last war, there was no choice.
I study war, and countering Communist provocations is a valid reason for the actions the US has taken since 1945. The real question is why Marxists can't admit that.
If you want peace, you should build less aircraft carriers and be more pragmatic about immigration.
People around the world are all for the Pax Americana, but only as long as they are granted a shot at the American dream too.
Many people in the US are just banking on the luck of being born within the invisible borders. People elsewhere will resent the US and the entire concept of Pax Americana when they see objectively dumb people having net worths in the 7 figures just because a rising American tide lifts all the American boats while at the same time the Government raises barriers to entry to make it harder for much more worthy would be boat owners to get access to such prosperity.
No, it's because after losing WW1 the losers thought they were still being oppressed so they started a new world war.
Germany is pretty much the go to case. They lost WW1, then the American hegemony financially repressed Germany through external debt so they had a pretty good reason to start a new war.
The death of the idea that power and suppression leads to peace is what has stopped world war 3. When WW2 ended, USA immediately turned Germany into an ally and economically supported it as much as it could with the Marshal Plan. It wasn't the aircraft carrier that brought peace, it was cooperation.
These are common myths. First, the WW1 post-inflation was due to an intentional German decision to inflate payments it could have easily paid (and losing actually more money in the process).
Second, the WW2 settlement was far more punishing to Germany than the WW1 settlement. The country was conquered, lost more territory than in WW1, split up and multiple diaspora populations were then pushed in.
> Germany is pretty much the go to case. They lost WW1, then the American hegemony financially repressed Germany through external debt so they had a pretty good reason to start a new war.
I have no idea who teaches this version of history, but it's like saying that the US Civil War started because of States's rights.
The German economy was in full swing by the time WW2 started and Germany had already shrugged off all of its post-WW1 commitments.
One major cause is that Hitler came to power. He did take advantage of the bad economy, but that was one rung on the ladder to power, one of the first. He knew he wouldn't get far with it alone, that's why he also recruited the stabbed in the back theory. Ludendorff and Hindenburg were the big promoters of the stabbed in the back theory, because, as the former military leaders of the German Empire in WW1, it shielded them from the consequences of their defeat. Ludendorff elevated Hitler politically and basically saved his life in the Putsch. Then Hindenburg got rid of all controls and gave Hitler total power. If it wasn't for Ludendorff and Hindenburg Hitler wouldn't have risen to some power and then had the keys to Germany handed to him.
Another important cause comes from how the other powers dealt with Hitler. They let him run amok, threaten war, and get his way, time and time again. Until they drew an arbitrary line in the sand (Poland) that didn't make a lot of sense for anyone. Hitler didn't think it was as a big a deal to invade Poland as France and Britain.
Stalin and the USSR contributed to starting WW2, it's not clear that Hitler would have invaded Poland if there hadn't been a treaty with the USSR.
And of course, another key cause of what we know as WW2 is the collapse of France. The war would likely have been contained and Hitler might even have been quickly defeated. That is its own complex topic.
But no. WW2 didn't happen because of economic oppression by the victors of WW1, just like the US Civil War didn't happen because of state's rights.
The defence industry already makes many tools for peace. A lot of effort goes into making tools to counteract opposing weaponry, much of which can be applied to defend civilians. But also weapons can defend civilians. The problem isn't having defence, it's how you use it.
Military budgets are peace spending. Wars begin when politicians think they can achieve goals easily using arms - see Germany's plans in the World Wars, Saddam's invasion of Iran, Russia's invasion of Ukraine after the 2013 revolution or most wars really.
Having strong armed forces and military alliances are an insurance policy against being invaded.
There isn't a linear relationship here. If our militaries were 50% weaker, we'd have thought twice before iraq 2 and we wouldn't be rattling the sabre at iran would we? So right now, for the US and allies, more preparing for war means more (pointless, wasteful) wars...
Would the US actually get into a major conflict with China over Taiwan? I could see a skirmish, but Ukraine has made it clear that the US will not defend its (non-NATO) allies in the face of full scale warfare.
People talk about Trump destroying the US's reputation as an ally, but no one sane should have trusted the US to go to war for them after Ukraine. "If you give up your nukes, we'll protect you", we said. Until we decided it wasn't convenient to do so.
An invasion of Taiwan would result in World War III in about 5 minutes. Seeing Taiwan through the eyes of Eastern Europe would be a mistake. The stakes are well understood, and giving up Taiwan would destabilize Japan, Korea, Australia, Indonesia and India, not a single one of which is acceptable to the US.
If that were the case, the US would form a mitary alliance with Taiwan, including mutual defence like say Nato. Instead the US maintains a policy of "strategic ambiguity" over whether and how much it would interfere were the PRC to try for "reunification" the hard way.
It really depends. When that quote of yours was first being said, essentially the only way for states to expand their power was to invade and occupy more territory. So states that did a lot of that tended to become more powerful, leading to a very warlike normal.
Nowadays, even radically successful wars are very unreliable means for achieving anything, and wars almost never improve a state's economic situation or power. If Germany had not started WW2, but had instead rested on its greater population and industrialization to increasingly dominate regional politics, you'd see a europe like the one we have today, except even more Germany-centric.
Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, and Adolf Hitler are all examples of weak leaders at the helm of fragile states, throwing the dice repeatedly and basically hoping they get a continual role of sixes until their domestic position is secure. Predictably, it basically never works out. There are almost no examples of successful annexations in today's world: gains are typically temporary, and basically never pay for themselves.
So in the world we live in, where war is basically never a sensible strategy for any goal, you can prepare for peace by, you know, preparing for peace - provided that you have no nutso neighbors. In which case, it's worth joining some kind of joint treaty organization. Which is why everybody does this.
PS: A second thing is, it's no use having a ton of outdated equipment. The USSR had a lot of trouble in WW2 because they had been arming up for too long. It's often better to move to a war footing just a few years before things get hairy than it is to keep massive amounts of obsolete weaponry sitting around.
> Wars begin when politicians think they can achieve goals easily using arms - see Germany's plans in the World Wars, Saddam's invasion of Iran, Russia's invasion of Ukraine after the 2013 revolution or most wars really.
That's like saying "wars start when someone thinks they can get something out of it" Well, that's meaningless.
The idea that simply having a lot of weapons handy stops wars is absurd. That's what we learned in WW1. Simply put "Si vis pacem, para bellum" has been trash for 100 years.
Wars happen for many reasons, even when people think they might lose the war!
- Ethnic strife (the Yugoslav wars)
- Humanitarian reasons (NATO intervention in Yugoslavia)
- They think that the other side would give in for a settled peace (Japan in WW2; Japan knew it could not completely defeat the US)
- Leaders want power and develop an external enemy (Hitler)
- Leaders think they will be limited (pretty much everyone in WW1)
We could go on.
Wars are a tool for different aims. Winning is obviously the goal, but wars don't happen like in video games like Civilization where you weigh the pros and cons of how many cities you want to capture and decide it's worth it.
The key word here is "easily" lets examine your examples:
- Miloshevich thought that by controlling the Yugoslav army he could easily beat the seceding states. Wrong, but at the beginning it certainly looked that way.
- NATO intervention in Yugoslavia. A collapsing state that was doing genocide. Drop a few bombs to destroy their will to fight in Kosovo and let the Kosovars take over and do the heavy fighting. It was an easy war from the NATO POV! Is NATO reacting the same way when Russia does the same as Serbia?
- US Iraq wars - isolated country that had outdated weaponry. The US did win them easily. At least the conventional part, but they underestimated the amount of nation-building that is needed.
- Hitler was used to appeasement, had a deal with Stalin (Molotov-Ribentrop) and knew that France and Britain didn't really want to fight. He was right about that all through the early months of the war. If France, the UK and USSR made clear that any shenanigans would result in a two or more front war, WWII would have been avoided. Hitler also thought that the USSR would collapse before winter 1941..
- WWI is the best example of all. No one thought that the war would last more than a few months, so it was a race to mobilise the quickly and attack your enemies. The Germans in particular thought they will quickly overrun France if they only went through neutral Belgium and Luxemburg..
This is why nuclear weapons are the best deterrent - even if you think you can win a nuclear war, the victory will not be sweet or easy.
Well, it's not like nobody has ever thought of that before. The best we've been able to do is deterrence, which requires developing advanced weapons like aircraft carriers, stealth fighters and nukes.
I know this isn't what you had in mind, but the world is about to find out what it's like to not have superpowers interfering in their affairs. The US doesn't really have any need for troops abroad: the Cold War is over, the War on Terror is over, and there's plenty of oil at home. Americans have noticed that depending on foreign manufacturing for key products like medicines and microchips isn't so great when trade is disrupted, and there are going to be a lot more disruptions without the US military to stabilize things. That's going to cause America to do more manufacturing at home and further disengage with the world.
That's not exactly peace, but at least it's not war.
if you don't have hegemony, you have the balance of powers: if you don't have the balance of powers, you have hegemony. if we're getting out from hegemony we'll go into the balance of powers (you can sort of see this in the everyone-surrounding-the-prc's reaction to the prc: everyone gangs up together to balance out the putative new hegemon)
you need total consensus down to the last man for pacifism to work. works great in groups of 10 people, not so much with groups of 2 billion: you need to credibly threaten the insane yelling person while making sure you're not the insane yelling person yourself
Balance of power caused millennia of war in Europe. Forming a hegemony has lead to almost 80 years of peace.
Large wars haven't been a thing since the dominance of the US and been pushed further and further to the periphery, especially since the end of the cold war.
bismark and metternich and so on managed to run around and mostly keep a general european peace with the balance of powers for 80 years from the 1820s on. too bad it all went to shit - but current events are not incompatible with the assertion that it's all going to shit this decade...
What's really weird is it's a world of about 200 "people" (sovereign states), completely without outside authority. Historically it has all been about power, with international law having a minor role - but it seems conceivable that all the nations could police one another and all international law could become much more effectively binding.
It wouldn't be as effective as universal pacifism, just like the police can't prevent all murders - but they can deter them. It could be a future that still has nation states rather than a world government, without any superpowers.
> Well, it's not like nobody has ever thought of that before.
Naturally. What we haven't done before is invested in tools. We've invested trillions to make tools for advertising, but almost nothing to make tools for achieving peace.
> The best we've been able to do is deterrence, which requires developing advanced weapons like aircraft carriers, stealth fighters and nukes.
I'm not suggesting war or deterrence can be obsoleted. Human nature is what it is.
What if for every $1 trillion of sticks, we had $1 trillion of carrots?
50 years from now, what if the 3rd generation carrots scaled better than the sticks, which don't scale at all?
> We've invested trillions to make tools for advertising, but almost nothing to make tools for achieving peace.
I'd argue the European Union was an experiment in peace along these lines, to bind a war-torn continent so close together that war becomes unthinkable. And it's worked - war between France and Germany, or the UK and Ireland, or Denmark and Sweden is unthinkable.
The US has parked an army in Germany for 75 years!
I dunno, but could this have been a factor in the "no war between European powers" thing?
And when we say "war between the UK and Ireland... unthinkable" do we mean that no-one is going to bomb or shoot people in the UK or Ireland to attempt to achieve a political objective in the relationships between those two countries? That would be jolly nice if it were come to pass !
Pretty sure it wasn't NATO that kept France from invading Germany, and vice versa. Or kept Spain from attempting to annex Portugal. Or even just Gibraltar.
But please provide some citations if that's incorrect.
This is exactly why the EU is not just an economic union, it's a political and judicial one as well. No on before WW1 would have even considered the idea that a French judge in a common European court could tell the German government what they can or can't do with respect to their own internal laws. Today, this is routine.
Second, I think thats misleading. The Irish military did scenario analysis on this in case they were asked, and concluded it was hopeless, if that's what you mean.
They do different things. Metaphorically, NATO is a wall-building exercise while the EU is bridge-building.
NATO has an external focus, initially keeping Europe safe from the Warsaw Pact.
The EU is an economic bloc: while it does have a mutual defence article, that article is explicitly secondary to NATO obligations. More importantly it builds the peace, with the primary threat being economic/political, with loss of access to the decision making process (if they’re a member state) or much softer and less well defined big-fish-ness (for non-member-states) rather than violence.
The point I was making was in response to the claim that the EU have been responsible for helping keeping the peace in Europe, which is clearly an incorrect claim.
In fact technically speaking neither NATO nor the EU have prevented wars happening in /Europe/ over the last 60-odd years. And I mean Europe. The EU is not Europe.
You only have to search on wars in Europe in the last 60 years, the list is long.
The comment from @dukeyukey that you replied to says, as a reply to the suggestion we invest in peace rather than adverts:
> I'd argue the European Union was an experiment in peace along these lines, to bind a war-torn continent so close together that war becomes unthinkable.
I read that as more about bridge-building (and building the peace) than “peace keeping” in the “play nice or we shoot” sense that I get from NATO.
> In fact technically speaking neither NATO nor the EU have prevented wars happening in /Europe/ over the last 60-odd years. And I mean Europe. The EU is not Europe.
Okay, but why must the perfect be the enemy of the good? The context looks to me like “the EU is an attempt” not “the EU perfectly does this thing”.
It's difficult to know if it's been the reason. Chances are that there wouldn't have been any wars without the EC/EU anyway.
Not sure Ireland vs. UK is a great example BTW.
And your example with Denmark and Sweden is particularly off-base since war between these has been unthinkable for over 200 years[1] -- much longer than the EC/EU has existed. Also, Sweden joined the EU in 1995, more than 20 years after Denmark did.
[1]: and it could be argued it goes back longer than that because the last clash was forced by their respective allies in the Napoleonic Wars, but neither Denmark nor Sweden actually did want to fight each other at all.
The US navy patrolling the oceans for the last 70 years was one prerequisite for globalization, and thus the world’s current level wealth, to happen. There used to be a lot more piracy or rogue states intercepting cargo.
To deny the positive effect Pax Americana had on the world is denying history. Doesn’t mean it was all roses and sunshine but better than what came before.
- Japan and Korea were historically enemies. But they've been at peace since WWII, mainly because both have US troops stationed there. Any time tensions flare up, the US does a little diplomacy and they make nice. That will probably continue for a while, even without US troops because both countries value the alliance with the US and don't want to be dominated by China.
- With the US withdrawing from the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is arming its self and allying with Israel (!) to deal with the threat from Iran. Iran, meanwhile is emboldened to attack Saudi oil fields and threaten shipping through the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile Yemen has destabilized, leaving Saudi Arabi to worry about whether it will be able to get access to the Arabian Sea. Hard to predict how this shakes out, but I can't see it being peaceful and stable.
- As soon as the US showed signs of disinterest in Europe, Russia annexed Crimea. With that experiment having been successful, they'll be looking for more opportunities to take back bits of the USSR. Now Europe is arming up to protect themselves from that threat. The catch is that Europe needs oil and natural gas, and that's mainly coming from Russia right now. We may see internal conflict in Europe over whether to be friendlier to Russia to secure that supply, and perhaps increased European presence in the Middle East. Either way, stability in that part of the world has decreased without US willingness to commit troops and money to maintaining it.
If you have something of value and you cannot protect it, someone will take it from you. That is just how the world works.
So how will you protect yourself? You cannot just convert eveyone to zen buddhism. You will have to find a way to protect yourself, so you can say: here is the limit that you cannot cross.
Peace can only exist when a powerful entity enforces it.
Yes, the vast majority of people doesn't behave like that.
Game theory is a discipline that studies the consequences of a even a small number of actors defecting norms that would otherwise be beneficial to everyone.
It's because of this subset that the world works the way it does. This subset is larger than you'd think and looking at countries beset with racial or ethnic or religious strife, it seems to me that nearly everybody has the potential for it. You are fortunate to likely live in a country where your existence isn't dependent on limited resources which have to be defended, so you can easily say "well, not everybody fights over resources or because they hate each other".
> Sometimes people build things of value and want others to take it. For example, open source.
And it's always suboptimal for the person who does it.
Want to compare the bank account/quality of life of Linus with the one of Larry Ellison or Bill Gates?
People rebut that given the geographical constraints and the "winner take all" market that is software Linus played his hand in the best way possible because there would have been no space to fight Microsoft, Apple or Oracle on a for-profit basis.
If that is true then it's not a real rebut, because it ceases to be altruism . It's just the same mental process experienced by entrepreneurs who decide to be at the helm of for-profit organizations. Except it has virtue signaling baked in it to sell it in a better way and capture a niche of people who are politically charged or hate big for-profit organizations.
I'd assume Linus has much better quality of life than Gates or Ellison. He's pretty well off, but doesn't have to suffer from recognazibility and billionaire problems.
Having your children abducted and held for ransom. People wanting to kill you because they think you put microchips in their bodies through a vaccine. Not knowing if people you meet are just trying to extract money or publicity from you.
The first 2 are solved by top notch security which billionaire money can buy (and then some)
The last "problem" honestly it's more of a compliment , and besides a billionaire's pockets are so deep that the extraction of money via social interactions are small leaks which are not only acceptable but should be again taken as a compliment.
>How much does peace cost?
> Has anybody ever costed it?
Depends on what you mean by 'tools' but I would say the Marshall plan, roughly $100B in today's money, would be a good example of this.
Explicit investment to rebuild Europe after WW2.
Some say this was because they learned it worked out badly to leave Germany broke and broken after WW1 (fertile ground for facism).
Others might say it was because a prosperous Europe wouldn't be as likely to become communist.
Either way I think it counts as an explicit mega investment in preventing war by peaceful means.
They could have just decided to invest the money in weapons instead.
The only reason why the Marshall plan worked is because there was a world war and nearly everybody in Europe decided "not again". Other countries have not made this experience and for them military conflict (or threat of conflict) is still a valid and legitimate way to protect their interests and expand their sphere of influence (see China and the South China sea). What worked in one place will not necessarily work elsewhere.
In fact, I think it's already proven to not have worked in the case of China. Despite the amount of money flowing into the country over the past 2 decades, their ambition and their tension with their neighbors have only grown. They're on their way to becoming a military superpower as well.
Definitely. Money isn't the solution to everything. It's necessary, but if there's no actual buy-in by the people and/or the ones in charge, it's like throwing money into a pit and setting it on fire.
What does peace look like to you? Do people just stop fighting and start loving their neighbours?
You mentioned Jerusalem. I'm Israeli, so I'm biased towards one side of the Jerusalem story but let me try to frame the other side of the story as to not play my biases. I probably won't be accurate because my propaganda is different from their propaganda. And I won't reply because this will otherwise turn into a flamewar real quick.
Does peace mean to you that the Palestinians stop fighting for a state of their own? They just raise their hands, lay down their guns, and embrace Jewish rule? Should they accept your $2 trillion - the number that you stated to invest in the peace project - as reparations for loosing their olive groves, villages, and roads to Israeli settlers? Will that be enough for them to embrace no public transportation on Saturdays, even though their culture would have it be Fridays? Will that be enough to forgive the years that cousin Ahmad sat in an Israeli prison? Will that be enough to forget the eye or leg or life that cousin Mahmaud lost?
And what of the five million people whose grandfathers either fled or were chased from Palestine in 1947? Should they accept some slice of the cash and relinquish their dream of returning to Palestine? Sure, some of them live in the US or Italy or the UK with their nice standard of living. But some of them live in refugee camps - to this day - in Lebanon and Syria and they have no rights in those countries. Under your peace plan, what becomes of a child in Yarmouk, whose family has been forbidden from education, health care, and most forms of work for three generations? Does he take that slice of $2 trillion and now buy a house in Syria? Forbidden to him. In the UK? He doesn't even qualify for a passport. In Palestine? Palestine has not enough land to quadruple its population. In Israel? To live under _their_ laws?!?!? What if Palestine and Israel are a single entity under this plan... does that make the situation easier or more difficult?
In my opinion, some problems just cannot be solved with money.
> Will that be enough for them to embrace no public transportation on Saturdays, even though their culture would have it be Fridays?
Crazy idea. Jews drive/catch public transportation on Fridays, muslims drive/catch transportation on Saturdays, and the rest of us ride around everyday of the week, because in what world is any of this a good idea?
Crazy idea, some employees take certain days off while others take different days off.
You know, like how every other critical industry operates operates, and how public transportation works in countries that don't shut it down once a week.
And how it already operates with a shift system, since driving heavy machinery full of people around cities for more than six hours a day is rather dangerous, but people like to be able to get around all day.
All drivers get two days a week off, one of them being their preference for Friday/Saturday/Sunday and the other not.
That is assuming that there is demand for those service in the days where otherwise it would have been shut down (Sun or Fri or Sat).
If a place ~90% shuts down on a particular day, running a skeleton service with limited staff may not be viable due to the fact that most of the infra needs to be nearly 100% operational to support skeleton crews and vehicles.
And also it may involve lot of planning to run skeleton operations (for all you know 10% of the users are sprinkled all over the grid - so which all routes you run the skeleton service, at what frequency etc.).
Again, this is a solved problem in countries that keep things moving every day of the week. For instance, trains may be replaced by busses on those days or bus routes may operate at reduced capacity.
Precisely. Making peace is all about making compromises too.
However in this example ,religious conflict is much much more nuanced and "precious" to people than most other forms of conflict since religion is a life long dedication.
Thank you for your perspective. One tip though, stop assuming a flamewar (which the awesome mods [shoutout to @dang, you rock!] would smother respectfully) this site is known and cherished for its' civilized discourse.
> What does peace look like to you? Do people just stop fighting and start loving their neighbours?
It would look a lot more like regional conflicts without $1 billion each fighter jets.
Iron Dome, drones and other technology prove this can be handled regionally without the need for a single advanced fighter jet, ballistic missile submarine, or any of these other frankly absurd expenditures.
The work force dedicated to these (admittedly very impressive) weapons of war would have to focus their skills elsewhere.
Peace is what the United States has had with Vietnam since 1975.
How can we understand that, when the reason for going to war, at the cost of 58,000 American lives, was that without an intervention, the domino theory predicted that the world order would inevitably collapse?
It didn't.
Vietnam, notwithstanding the pandemic, is a tourist destination where 18 year old American kids have the time of their live in complete safety.
Money for peace would investigate this outcome with the aim of advancing our theoretical knowledge so we might get it right next time, in time to avoid conflict.
Are you saying the West was unable to distinguish between Hitler and other world leaders, 20 years later? That sounds like a cognitive bias, akin to PTSD. Surely it would be better for the world to develop therapies for that cognitive bias instead of going to war.
> Also the Communists were quite open about their plans for world domination.
Didn't the Russians defeat Hitler, at the cost of 22 million Russian casualties?
What plans for world domination are you referring to?
Can you point to any act of armed aggression by the Russians against a Western government?
Can you point to any act of armed aggression by the Chinese Communist Part against a western government?
> Are you saying the West was unable to distinguish between Hitler and other world leaders, 20 years later?
Stalin was almost every bit as bad as Hitler and outlasted him by almost a decade.
Others were just as bad just less "successful".
Also, after a painful lesson in dealing with mad dictators I'm actually glad the west didn't forget the lesson so fast.
> Didn't the Russians defeat Hitler, at the cost of 22 million Russian casualties?
I give you this, this is partially true:
They absolutely played a huge part in it but were themselves saved by Churchill after doing the same blunder as the west: trusting Hitler.
> What plans for world domination are you referring to?
Please do read up on the history of international Communism and Socialism.
> Can you point to any act of armed aggression by the Russians against a Western government?
Besides numerous proxy wars, occupying half of Europe, and, more recently starting a war against Ukraine and shooting down MH-17?
> Can you point to any act of armed aggression by the Chinese Communist Part against a western government?
They haven't dared that quite yet as far as I know but they've broken the agreement with Britain about Hong Kong quite thoroughly, they keep stealing fish (note: the west has also been guilty of this).
It's not me I'm enquiring about, or the history of China and Britain.
I'm advocating investing in peace.
You seem to be saying the bad guys were bent on taking over the world, so the good guys were justified in going to war to stop them.
If it were that simple, war would be inevitable, and killing all the bad guys would fix the problem once and for all.
But the history of conflict is more complicated than that, and you know it. That's why you declined to state the facts you know about Hong Kong, which was a part of a sovereign nation that was invaded by foreign powers and held hostage.
I'm not saying the suppression of freedom in Hong Kong is 2021 is a good thing. If you put it in to context, it is a tit for a 100 year old tat, that was proceeded by the Opium Wars, which I'm happy to discuss with you further, but we'd achieve more by talking about peace.
How do we put an end to infinite rounds of tit for tat that escalate into violence and destruction?
We started off talking about Vietnam, which today is a Communist nation that hosts tourists from all over the western world, as charmingly and enthusiastically as its former coloniser, France.
How can that be?
Why isn't Vietnam full of retribution for the deaths and mayhem wrought on it by foreign powers?
If we investigate that, and have the courage to re-think history back to the point where we invaded that country to kill communists so as to promote freedom, what might we learn?
I don't know the answer, because we haven't done the investigation, which would cost a few million and take a few years. Those millions haven't been allocated by any western nation, but their collective budgets for war is in the trillions every year.
Why is that? If we start with that question, we'll be on the way to developing tools for peace.
What even are "tools for peace"?
You might be interested to ask Chuck Feeney. He's no communist. He's an American businessman who made billions out of Duty Free Shopping in Hong Kong. Chuck invented the whole category of Duty Free Shopping at airports, an art he pioneered and mastered.
What did he do with those billions? Well, he didn't buy any Mazerattis, Ferraris, Teslas, penthouses, yachts, movie studios or rocket ships. Those things didn't interest him. The guy was more interested in a different form of happiness, and so he spent the fruits of capitalism chasing peace.
$2 trillions could have been used to convert Palestinians into Jews, Christians, Jains or Buddhists, peacefully of-course. While it may not have resolved all the conflicts, it definitely would have reduced it drastically.
> How much does peace cost? Has anybody ever costed it?
In the end these are jobs programs, as you mention the infamous "military industrial complex". They become part of a nation's economic engine.
The media will fret about deficit spending, healthcare, "socialists", inflation etc. when in reality there are bodies charged with ensuring that all remains sane .... at least on the monetary side (in the US, the Federal Reserve).
Nobody needs a new fighter jet or submarine when a few nations have enough weapons to obliterate civilization 50 times over.
It seems in Europe there is the general idea that with the USA waning as the sole superpower, and further with the USA more and more focused on great power competition with China [1] rather than partnering with Europe against the Soviet Union, Europe must take on more responsibility for its own defense. Including the capability to build top of the line high tech military gear like fighter jets.
Of course, the problem is how to convince European tax payers to part with the money necessary for this. Particularly as we already have two separate European projects to design next gen fighters, the UK-Italian-Swedish Tempest as well as the French-German-Spanish FCAS. Like herding cats.
I wonder what could be done to reduce the cost of developing a new top of the line fighter? More COTS components? A modular approach, which is certainly much more limited in scope in high-performance aircraft than e.g. in cars?
As an European taxpayer, I'm certainly concerned that resources are wasted. OTOH, Putin has time and again proved that he's a belligerent crook entirely willing to expand his territory any time his neighbors show weakness. Much as I wish it were different, Europe must be able to mount a credible defense, with or without the USA.
Is it a given that France or the UK would deploy their nukes in response to, for example, Russian aggression on Europe’s eastern flank, say Estonia? If not, their use as a deterrence there is limited.
The risk I see is, that the EU and NATO isn't showing a hard line (might alternative be too late, so) to Putin. Then all it takes for him to try annexing the Baltic is the reasonable impression NATO isn't willing to go to full over that. In which case we would be screwed. The abandonment of Afghanistan certainly didn't help in projecting that kind of strength.
As another European, I am in favor of aligning ourselves in a mutually beneficial economic exchange with Russia and China, which causes interdependence and a diminishing risk of military conflict.
Putin, repeatedly, has been shown to be a reliable, and predictable partner - something we cannot really claim about the US, and increasingly less so in recent years.
Putin has not shown to be an reliable ally. The annexation of Crimea and the ongoing hybrid war in east Ukraine is one such example.
Putin does not want a strong independent ally next to Russia. He either wants puppet states such as Belarus as allies or a weak and fractured European union. For all the faults the US have they are still better allies than Russia by several lightyears.
May be if granted a buffer zone of influence, Russia will be a reliable partner to Europe. To me it is Europe (and the US) that is picking ideological battlegrounds, and showing eagerness to start a new cold war.
Let me rephrase that for you from the perspective of someone who lived on Russia's doorstep for many years.
You mean to say "Maybe if we let Russia subjugate a lot more people and confine them into an evil exploitative system against their will".
That's the big difference between Europe's zone of influence and Russia's zone of influence. People want to be part of the EU (the greatest thing that ever happened to the country I was born in). People want to give their lives to not be part of Russia.
I think everyone in Europe is keen on "mutually beneficial economic exchange with Russia and China" but I think that recent history demonstrates that Russia and China have different views from us about what mutually beneficial means.
>Putin, repeatedly, has been shown to be a reliable, and predictable partner
Reducing military development costs has some solutions, but it’s difficult to apply in practice.
The most effective things you can do is to not force spreading the work across specific companies and countries, and not change the specs as the program goes.
Jesus Christ. This is one of those articles that just repeats the same piece of information no less than 4 times! Plus I’ve already read the headline here on HN
Human nature, sadly, is such that "It is better to be a warrior in a garden than to be a gardener in war". You will find similar sentiments with Machiavelli, Zen, Art of War etc.
Good example that cooperation between states, doesn't need a Parliament in Brussels or a "Commission".
Not signing up for the same currency, the same fishing laws, the same legislations on trade, borders, etc, does not mean you cannot team up with a few other countries on topics of interest.
This is a play to gain entry to the US program and secure not for export versions and subcontracts. If India gets involved then it becomes a serious program, because that will indicate that the US is refusing to play ball and everyone else has to go it alone.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadIs this flexibility really a worthy goal? I feel like it would be better for these countries to reduce the number of variables and work to scalably and cheaply build many of them. It doesn’t have to be one plane for every mission necessarily, but the ability to customize for each nation feels like a distraction rather than a feature.
I also suspect it would help if you have air war doctrine differences with the US (like guns vs missiles as an example).
[1] Space, Weight, and Power. It defines the envelope within which the avionics and other gear have to operate.
The MDBA Meteor (European AMRAAM competitor, generally viewed as the best beyond visual range air to air missile (BVRAAM) currently) has been in service since 2016, but won't work on F-35s until ~2026. For comparison, it only took ~1.5 years to integrate the Meteor on UK Eurofighters.
So the only way to get them onboard is to make the association loose. I can't tell if this is good or bad - it might mean that the Swedes will make something affordable out of it and the rest will blow billions on various Golden Geese (is that the right term?).
There's some interesting Japanese technology - e.g. their AESA missile radars would go into the Meteor to bring it far out ahead of anything else. Also I think they have some ceramics in their fighter engines etc which are of high interest.
Seems reasonable, all else being equal, the party that is detected last has a higher chance of winning.
What happens when a new detection method is developed that makes these planes not stealthy? Don't you then just have 4-5th gen craft that cost 2-10x as much?
Guess it takes a real war to discover the actual winner of modern warfare.
The Zumwalt class started out as a requirement from the armed forces committee in congress for a replacement for the old battleship Naval Gunfire Support mission. That is sit a bit off the coast and go boom with big guns to help the boots on the ground.
Just one wee little problem with that: anti ship missiles have made that a suicide mission since approximately the late 60s. And no, all the stealth in the world wasn't going to make a difference in that when a simple counter battery radar would spot you, not to mention other means.
The Navy tried to get out of it but couldn't, so we got stuck building 3 rather useless boats and then canceling the program. Some neat naval design and engineering went into them which may be useful in the future, but it wasn't worth it for the sticker price at all.
The people created this fuster cluck are the same folks that kept the battleships operational or semi operational post WW2 when it was clear they were obsolete, at non trivial cost to taxpayers.
The Navy's plan for them now is to convert them into missile boats for the new hypersonic missiles, if/when those are ready, so they main end up being somewhat useful eventually. But again, you'd not want to spend money the way we had to get to this result if you had some way to rewind the errors.
Can that be what 'stealth' means? Sensing technology must be progressing faster than the ability to remain off-radar. Between satellites, internet connected mobiles and general improvements in radar technology I'm not sure that a stealth aircraft can be undetected.
Also, stealth should never work alone, it should work in coordination with non-stealth aircraft, drones and stand off jammers as a coherent whole. Detecting stealth aircraft is easy, detecting stealth aircraft against massive background noise from a wall of jammers while missiles and drones are going after your radars is a lot harder.
There's no hiding in space, US, Russia and China have all demonstrated abilities to destroy satellites. In a significant war between any of those three nations those satellites will be gone in a week, maybe even a day.
You can be assured that Russia and China are working hard on technology to detect stealth planes (e.g. multistatic radar systems). But again, it's not a binary thing. Even with a multistatic radar setup, a stealth aircraft will have lower detection range than a non-stealthy one. And considering both China and Russia are developing stealthy aircraft like Su-57 and J-20, it seems they themselves are not thinking that they have the magic technology that would make stealth obsolete.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKJ-uS55mhM
The next war is going to be a drone (low-intensity) and hypersonic missile (high-intensity) war... it's not going to look like Top Gun.
What happened to 'step-outs' ?
1) Get the money. DOD likes to talk about future contracts. Nothing is real until contract is signed
2) Keep the money. DOD likes to cost sharing where the contractor has to pay the Military for the things they were already going to do, facilities that already exist, etc
3) Get more money. A contract just sets you up for winning the next contract
I'd love to see the EU more militarily independent from the US. Especially because they tend to start wars for economic reasons. Sponsoring the military industrial complex, oil reasons.. In Europe we view the military more as defense and not as a geopolitical or economical tool. We also view joining the military more as a job and less as a duty to our country. But if EU countries start opting out it'll never happen.
We can still be friends with the US, but less military ties would be appreciated IMO.
That isn’t a good thing. See the former Afghan National Army (ANA)
Please tell me what they could have done instead, being locked between a nazi-occupied country (Norway), one at war and partially occupied by the Soviets (Finland) and with a military monster to the south.
Sweden had to play nice or risk being squashed like a bug. Pretty much the same Switzerland ended up doing.
But those ball bearings and other parts helped kill a lot of allies.
Because Sweden had a credible military. Not that she could have resisted indefinitely to a German invasion, but subduing her would have taken time the Axis did not have.
> And at the same time were so hell-bent on conquering the empty deserts in North Africa.
Sweden was neutral. Britain and Free France weren't.
> But those ball bearings and other parts helped kill a lot of allies.
Poland was an ally. It was split between Germany and the Soviet Union (and sold off to the Soviets after the war, but that was yet to come). Do you think Sweden should have sacrificed herself after seeing that?
I think all aspects of doing things that private enterprises or free market economy cannot simply afford should be maintained. From how nuclear weapons work to sending probes to Venus to smashing protons. The brain power needs to be fed with regular annual maintenance. It shouldn't be a partisan circus. This is an actual need / problem. Sure, the feeding frenzy can get the MIC to show the dark side of capitalism, let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Also Defense is a diplomacy business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_pact trading it for soft power, coercion, economic benefit, regional peace, etc.
I think things might get a bit crazy in the next century with climate change creating a lot of additional pressure, so I don't mind living in a well-armed Western Bloc, but that does not mean I have to ignore the incredible waste. I remember a Youtube summary/satire about the Bradley vehicle development, as an example for how it works (although it really shouldn't): https://youtu.be/aXQ2lO3ieBA --- and that is before senators get involved who are concerned about getting and keeping spending for their state.
In fact I remember watching a military channel doc in 2010 where it pointed out that was the ideal strategy at that point anyway.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3147997/reg...
Similar parallels can be drawn to the Iranian attack on Saudi refineries recently. The line between cruise missiles and drones blurred.
So, yes, there is a move towards cruise missiles being chassis you can task with routine intelligence gathering, picket etc and even launching stand-off ordinance.
There was similar lack of faith in the British tigerfish in the 80s.
But generally modern torpedos are expected to work effectively and are tested.
Sweden is leading the way on the dronification of torpedos.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto
They are called UAVs and indeed cost millions each.
When people talk about how they can build lethal drones for $100 or something they assume that you can launch the weapon 3 miles away from the target and that the target has already been spotted.
It's like saying that a million dollars can kill a million people because bullets cost less than $1. Making the bullet is the easy part. You still have to deliver it to the target.
In 2015 the United States planned to procure 7,474 rounds with a FY2015 total program cost of US$1.9341 billion at an average cost of US$258,777 per unit.[6] By 2016, unit costs were reduced to US$68,000 per round
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur
There's also the class of "Loitering munition", which was used to great effect in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war.
https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/loitering-munitions-pre...
For more details, see https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentar...
Japan is very afraid of China, along with the USA.
(China must be afraid of the USA. They are afraid there might be a incident before they equal us militarily? And it looks like they are closing in.)
A trillion for Afghanistan and F-35 each. Jeez, what could we have built with $2 trillion in investments? What cool companies, technologies or infrastructure could have sprung from this?
Then another 0.5-1 trillion dollars over 50 years to keep them flying. An astronomical waste of money.
"Tempest will be able to fly unmanned, and use swarming technology to control drones. It will incorporate artificial intelligence deep learning and carry directed-energy weapons. The aircraft will have a Cooperative Engagement Capability which is the ability to share data and messages with other aircraft and coordinate actions. Tempest will feature an adaptive cycle engine and a virtual cockpit shown on a pilot's helmet-mounted display. A generator that delivers "unprecedented levels" of electrical power has also been developed for the aircraft."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Tempest
Someone at MOD has finally learned... "what do you mean you can't move the ship and turn the radar on at the same time".. "what do you mean you can't fit catapults because there's nothing to power them".. etc etc etc
But what if for the same money, or less, we could buy something even better?
How much does peace cost?
Has anybody ever costed it?
For example, what could $2 trillion have bought in Iraq, Portland, or Jerusalem if it had been intelligently deployed for peace instead of war?
I know there is no handbook for peace, whilst there is a whole military industrial complex for war.
But what if smart people with budget built tools for peace?
I’m not saying the design, engineering, and deployment of these tools would be easy, obvious, or quick. But what if smart people built them, and, once built, they could scale?
It's absolutely true that weapons can be tools for peace, but I don't think that is how the projects in Afghanistan and Iraq played out. Even with the best intentions the fact that it is a military operation planned by military leaders and staffed by trained military personnel means that you're going to get particular kinds of approaches.
I think the suggestion is to approach these projects as an equivalently resouced mission with different aims and led by different people and to see if the balance of resources they would choose would be different.
Some of this goes into jobs. Occasionally - exceptionally, and less often than most people realise - some of it spins off into useful civilian tech.
But most of it is just free money for nothing much to not very nice people. Some of whom use it to buy political influence. And some of whom use existing political influence to make sure they benefit from it personally.
It's a perfect circle of corruption and moral decay built on foundations of death and terror.
When nukes came into play, the consequences of violating the peace became too much for any sane state to countenance. The US used nuclear superiority to take on the role of global leviathan.
Despite missteps, it used its monopoly on violence as a very big stick that's allowed for a very lengthy peace. If certain idiot regimes keep playing stupid games, we're going to see what happens when the nuclear stick gets used, unfortunately. That might ensure a century or so of peace, if everything doesn't die.
There's a reason why the french and the british were so reluctant to start WW2 - the first world war was completely devastating to their societies, and it didn't even improve their security, since Germany was able to relatively quickly rebuild and rearm.
IRAQ WAR (2003-2011)
WAR IN AFGHANISTAN (2001-PRESENT)
GULF WAR (1990-1991)
VIETNAM WAR (1959-1975)
KOREAN WAR (1950-1953)
This is ignoring an entire array of coups, rebellions, brutal suppressions and subjugations encompassing basically every country in South America
The last 70 years have only seemed peaceful because your the one doing the genocide this time around. Most of the rest of the world would like you to chill.
I could try and argue India is now a better place because the period know as Pax Britannica almost gave them the toilet but you'd rightly consider me a mad man.
Do you think any of the places listed above were improved by being turned in to weapon testing ranges?
"This entry presents an empirical perspective on the history of war and peace. We also published a data visualization history of human violence here on OurWorldInData.org which presents empirical data showing that we are now living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence."
* Non-war, I think, is a less charged term here, “peace” sounds like an unmistakably good thing, which it isn’t necessarily — or at least there is a long debate to be had about that as well.
Both the Korean war and the Vietnam war were a reply to Communist invasions, so China was at fault.
The Gulf war was a reply to Hussein occupying Kuwait and attempting to occupy the entire Middle East.
The early AFGHANISTAN war was a reply to Al Qaeda.
The Iraq war was to finish the hunt for Hussein.
Except for the last war, there was no choice.
I study war, and countering Communist provocations is a valid reason for the actions the US has taken since 1945. The real question is why Marxists can't admit that.
If you want peace, you should build less aircraft carriers and be more pragmatic about immigration.
People around the world are all for the Pax Americana, but only as long as they are granted a shot at the American dream too.
Many people in the US are just banking on the luck of being born within the invisible borders. People elsewhere will resent the US and the entire concept of Pax Americana when they see objectively dumb people having net worths in the 7 figures just because a rising American tide lifts all the American boats while at the same time the Government raises barriers to entry to make it harder for much more worthy would be boat owners to get access to such prosperity.
Germany is pretty much the go to case. They lost WW1, then the American hegemony financially repressed Germany through external debt so they had a pretty good reason to start a new war.
The death of the idea that power and suppression leads to peace is what has stopped world war 3. When WW2 ended, USA immediately turned Germany into an ally and economically supported it as much as it could with the Marshal Plan. It wasn't the aircraft carrier that brought peace, it was cooperation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan
Second, the WW2 settlement was far more punishing to Germany than the WW1 settlement. The country was conquered, lost more territory than in WW1, split up and multiple diaspora populations were then pushed in.
I have no idea who teaches this version of history, but it's like saying that the US Civil War started because of States's rights.
The German economy was in full swing by the time WW2 started and Germany had already shrugged off all of its post-WW1 commitments.
The causes of WW2 are complex, but they're well understood today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_II
One major cause is that Hitler came to power. He did take advantage of the bad economy, but that was one rung on the ladder to power, one of the first. He knew he wouldn't get far with it alone, that's why he also recruited the stabbed in the back theory. Ludendorff and Hindenburg were the big promoters of the stabbed in the back theory, because, as the former military leaders of the German Empire in WW1, it shielded them from the consequences of their defeat. Ludendorff elevated Hitler politically and basically saved his life in the Putsch. Then Hindenburg got rid of all controls and gave Hitler total power. If it wasn't for Ludendorff and Hindenburg Hitler wouldn't have risen to some power and then had the keys to Germany handed to him.
Another important cause comes from how the other powers dealt with Hitler. They let him run amok, threaten war, and get his way, time and time again. Until they drew an arbitrary line in the sand (Poland) that didn't make a lot of sense for anyone. Hitler didn't think it was as a big a deal to invade Poland as France and Britain.
Stalin and the USSR contributed to starting WW2, it's not clear that Hitler would have invaded Poland if there hadn't been a treaty with the USSR.
And of course, another key cause of what we know as WW2 is the collapse of France. The war would likely have been contained and Hitler might even have been quickly defeated. That is its own complex topic.
But no. WW2 didn't happen because of economic oppression by the victors of WW1, just like the US Civil War didn't happen because of state's rights.
Individuals who dedicate their lives to violence and aggression in the way that superpowers do are committed to institutions.
Military budgets are peace spending. Wars begin when politicians think they can achieve goals easily using arms - see Germany's plans in the World Wars, Saddam's invasion of Iran, Russia's invasion of Ukraine after the 2013 revolution or most wars really.
Having strong armed forces and military alliances are an insurance policy against being invaded.
Nowadays, even radically successful wars are very unreliable means for achieving anything, and wars almost never improve a state's economic situation or power. If Germany had not started WW2, but had instead rested on its greater population and industrialization to increasingly dominate regional politics, you'd see a europe like the one we have today, except even more Germany-centric.
Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, and Adolf Hitler are all examples of weak leaders at the helm of fragile states, throwing the dice repeatedly and basically hoping they get a continual role of sixes until their domestic position is secure. Predictably, it basically never works out. There are almost no examples of successful annexations in today's world: gains are typically temporary, and basically never pay for themselves.
So in the world we live in, where war is basically never a sensible strategy for any goal, you can prepare for peace by, you know, preparing for peace - provided that you have no nutso neighbors. In which case, it's worth joining some kind of joint treaty organization. Which is why everybody does this.
PS: A second thing is, it's no use having a ton of outdated equipment. The USSR had a lot of trouble in WW2 because they had been arming up for too long. It's often better to move to a war footing just a few years before things get hairy than it is to keep massive amounts of obsolete weaponry sitting around.
That's like saying "wars start when someone thinks they can get something out of it" Well, that's meaningless.
The idea that simply having a lot of weapons handy stops wars is absurd. That's what we learned in WW1. Simply put "Si vis pacem, para bellum" has been trash for 100 years.
Wars happen for many reasons, even when people think they might lose the war!
- Ethnic strife (the Yugoslav wars) - Humanitarian reasons (NATO intervention in Yugoslavia) - They think that the other side would give in for a settled peace (Japan in WW2; Japan knew it could not completely defeat the US) - Leaders want power and develop an external enemy (Hitler) - Leaders think they will be limited (pretty much everyone in WW1)
We could go on.
Wars are a tool for different aims. Winning is obviously the goal, but wars don't happen like in video games like Civilization where you weigh the pros and cons of how many cities you want to capture and decide it's worth it.
- Miloshevich thought that by controlling the Yugoslav army he could easily beat the seceding states. Wrong, but at the beginning it certainly looked that way.
- NATO intervention in Yugoslavia. A collapsing state that was doing genocide. Drop a few bombs to destroy their will to fight in Kosovo and let the Kosovars take over and do the heavy fighting. It was an easy war from the NATO POV! Is NATO reacting the same way when Russia does the same as Serbia?
- US Iraq wars - isolated country that had outdated weaponry. The US did win them easily. At least the conventional part, but they underestimated the amount of nation-building that is needed.
- Hitler was used to appeasement, had a deal with Stalin (Molotov-Ribentrop) and knew that France and Britain didn't really want to fight. He was right about that all through the early months of the war. If France, the UK and USSR made clear that any shenanigans would result in a two or more front war, WWII would have been avoided. Hitler also thought that the USSR would collapse before winter 1941..
- WWI is the best example of all. No one thought that the war would last more than a few months, so it was a race to mobilise the quickly and attack your enemies. The Germans in particular thought they will quickly overrun France if they only went through neutral Belgium and Luxemburg..
This is why nuclear weapons are the best deterrent - even if you think you can win a nuclear war, the victory will not be sweet or easy.
I know this isn't what you had in mind, but the world is about to find out what it's like to not have superpowers interfering in their affairs. The US doesn't really have any need for troops abroad: the Cold War is over, the War on Terror is over, and there's plenty of oil at home. Americans have noticed that depending on foreign manufacturing for key products like medicines and microchips isn't so great when trade is disrupted, and there are going to be a lot more disruptions without the US military to stabilize things. That's going to cause America to do more manufacturing at home and further disengage with the world.
That's not exactly peace, but at least it's not war.
you need total consensus down to the last man for pacifism to work. works great in groups of 10 people, not so much with groups of 2 billion: you need to credibly threaten the insane yelling person while making sure you're not the insane yelling person yourself
Large wars haven't been a thing since the dominance of the US and been pushed further and further to the periphery, especially since the end of the cold war.
It wouldn't be as effective as universal pacifism, just like the police can't prevent all murders - but they can deter them. It could be a future that still has nation states rather than a world government, without any superpowers.
Naturally. What we haven't done before is invested in tools. We've invested trillions to make tools for advertising, but almost nothing to make tools for achieving peace.
> The best we've been able to do is deterrence, which requires developing advanced weapons like aircraft carriers, stealth fighters and nukes.
I'm not suggesting war or deterrence can be obsoleted. Human nature is what it is.
What if for every $1 trillion of sticks, we had $1 trillion of carrots?
50 years from now, what if the 3rd generation carrots scaled better than the sticks, which don't scale at all?
I'd argue the European Union was an experiment in peace along these lines, to bind a war-torn continent so close together that war becomes unthinkable. And it's worked - war between France and Germany, or the UK and Ireland, or Denmark and Sweden is unthinkable.
OH YES!
The US has parked an army in Germany for 75 years!
I dunno, but could this have been a factor in the "no war between European powers" thing?
And when we say "war between the UK and Ireland... unthinkable" do we mean that no-one is going to bomb or shoot people in the UK or Ireland to attempt to achieve a political objective in the relationships between those two countries? That would be jolly nice if it were come to pass !
But please provide some citations if that's incorrect.
Know who was the biggest trading partner for France and Germany in 1914? It was each other.
This is exactly why the EU is not just an economic union, it's a political and judicial one as well. No on before WW1 would have even considered the idea that a French judge in a common European court could tell the German government what they can or can't do with respect to their own internal laws. Today, this is routine.
No, that's not what we mean.
War between the UK and the RoI, the actual states involved, is in fact pretty unthinkable.
Second, I think thats misleading. The Irish military did scenario analysis on this in case they were asked, and concluded it was hopeless, if that's what you mean.
NATO has been the peacekeeping element in Europe. Not the EU, which is a far younger organisation than NATO.
NATO has an external focus, initially keeping Europe safe from the Warsaw Pact.
The EU is an economic bloc: while it does have a mutual defence article, that article is explicitly secondary to NATO obligations. More importantly it builds the peace, with the primary threat being economic/political, with loss of access to the decision making process (if they’re a member state) or much softer and less well defined big-fish-ness (for non-member-states) rather than violence.
In fact technically speaking neither NATO nor the EU have prevented wars happening in /Europe/ over the last 60-odd years. And I mean Europe. The EU is not Europe.
You only have to search on wars in Europe in the last 60 years, the list is long.
> I'd argue the European Union was an experiment in peace along these lines, to bind a war-torn continent so close together that war becomes unthinkable.
I read that as more about bridge-building (and building the peace) than “peace keeping” in the “play nice or we shoot” sense that I get from NATO.
> In fact technically speaking neither NATO nor the EU have prevented wars happening in /Europe/ over the last 60-odd years. And I mean Europe. The EU is not Europe.
Okay, but why must the perfect be the enemy of the good? The context looks to me like “the EU is an attempt” not “the EU perfectly does this thing”.
Not sure Ireland vs. UK is a great example BTW.
And your example with Denmark and Sweden is particularly off-base since war between these has been unthinkable for over 200 years[1] -- much longer than the EC/EU has existed. Also, Sweden joined the EU in 1995, more than 20 years after Denmark did.
[1]: and it could be argued it goes back longer than that because the last clash was forced by their respective allies in the Napoleonic Wars, but neither Denmark nor Sweden actually did want to fight each other at all.
> there are going to be a lot more disruptions without the US military to stabilize things
Or, you know...
there are going to be a lot fewer disruptions without the US military to destabilize things
To deny the positive effect Pax Americana had on the world is denying history. Doesn’t mean it was all roses and sunshine but better than what came before.
- Japan and Korea were historically enemies. But they've been at peace since WWII, mainly because both have US troops stationed there. Any time tensions flare up, the US does a little diplomacy and they make nice. That will probably continue for a while, even without US troops because both countries value the alliance with the US and don't want to be dominated by China.
- With the US withdrawing from the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is arming its self and allying with Israel (!) to deal with the threat from Iran. Iran, meanwhile is emboldened to attack Saudi oil fields and threaten shipping through the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile Yemen has destabilized, leaving Saudi Arabi to worry about whether it will be able to get access to the Arabian Sea. Hard to predict how this shakes out, but I can't see it being peaceful and stable.
- As soon as the US showed signs of disinterest in Europe, Russia annexed Crimea. With that experiment having been successful, they'll be looking for more opportunities to take back bits of the USSR. Now Europe is arming up to protect themselves from that threat. The catch is that Europe needs oil and natural gas, and that's mainly coming from Russia right now. We may see internal conflict in Europe over whether to be friendlier to Russia to secure that supply, and perhaps increased European presence in the Middle East. Either way, stability in that part of the world has decreased without US willingness to commit troops and money to maintaining it.
So how will you protect yourself? You cannot just convert eveyone to zen buddhism. You will have to find a way to protect yourself, so you can say: here is the limit that you cannot cross.
Peace can only exist when a powerful entity enforces it.
Game theory is a discipline that studies the consequences of a even a small number of actors defecting norms that would otherwise be beneficial to everyone.
And it's always suboptimal for the person who does it.
Want to compare the bank account/quality of life of Linus with the one of Larry Ellison or Bill Gates?
People rebut that given the geographical constraints and the "winner take all" market that is software Linus played his hand in the best way possible because there would have been no space to fight Microsoft, Apple or Oracle on a for-profit basis.
If that is true then it's not a real rebut, because it ceases to be altruism . It's just the same mental process experienced by entrepreneurs who decide to be at the helm of for-profit organizations. Except it has virtue signaling baked in it to sell it in a better way and capture a niche of people who are politically charged or hate big for-profit organizations.
It's a mistake to assume that all people are socially anxious just because one is posting on HN or reddit.
Recognazibility is lit and so are billionaire problems (btw what billionaire problems? Failing to win the America's Cup? G650ER mantainance fee?)
The last "problem" honestly it's more of a compliment , and besides a billionaire's pockets are so deep that the extraction of money via social interactions are small leaks which are not only acceptable but should be again taken as a compliment.
We have this. Certain civilizations can wipe us out at the push of a button.
The players who aren't in that same realm have to hope those that are do the right thing.
Fighter jets aren't going to help.
We don't want to buy, we want to own it. War means stealing from weaker countries.
> How much does peace cost?
Depends on the country. See eastern and central europe for some examples, north africa for others.
> Has anybody ever costed it?
No and the profitors don't want you to know.
Depends on what you mean by 'tools' but I would say the Marshall plan, roughly $100B in today's money, would be a good example of this.
Explicit investment to rebuild Europe after WW2.
Some say this was because they learned it worked out badly to leave Germany broke and broken after WW1 (fertile ground for facism). Others might say it was because a prosperous Europe wouldn't be as likely to become communist.
Either way I think it counts as an explicit mega investment in preventing war by peaceful means.
They could have just decided to invest the money in weapons instead.
In fact, I think it's already proven to not have worked in the case of China. Despite the amount of money flowing into the country over the past 2 decades, their ambition and their tension with their neighbors have only grown. They're on their way to becoming a military superpower as well.
You mentioned Jerusalem. I'm Israeli, so I'm biased towards one side of the Jerusalem story but let me try to frame the other side of the story as to not play my biases. I probably won't be accurate because my propaganda is different from their propaganda. And I won't reply because this will otherwise turn into a flamewar real quick.
Does peace mean to you that the Palestinians stop fighting for a state of their own? They just raise their hands, lay down their guns, and embrace Jewish rule? Should they accept your $2 trillion - the number that you stated to invest in the peace project - as reparations for loosing their olive groves, villages, and roads to Israeli settlers? Will that be enough for them to embrace no public transportation on Saturdays, even though their culture would have it be Fridays? Will that be enough to forgive the years that cousin Ahmad sat in an Israeli prison? Will that be enough to forget the eye or leg or life that cousin Mahmaud lost?
And what of the five million people whose grandfathers either fled or were chased from Palestine in 1947? Should they accept some slice of the cash and relinquish their dream of returning to Palestine? Sure, some of them live in the US or Italy or the UK with their nice standard of living. But some of them live in refugee camps - to this day - in Lebanon and Syria and they have no rights in those countries. Under your peace plan, what becomes of a child in Yarmouk, whose family has been forbidden from education, health care, and most forms of work for three generations? Does he take that slice of $2 trillion and now buy a house in Syria? Forbidden to him. In the UK? He doesn't even qualify for a passport. In Palestine? Palestine has not enough land to quadruple its population. In Israel? To live under _their_ laws?!?!? What if Palestine and Israel are a single entity under this plan... does that make the situation easier or more difficult?
In my opinion, some problems just cannot be solved with money.
Crazy idea. Jews drive/catch public transportation on Fridays, muslims drive/catch transportation on Saturdays, and the rest of us ride around everyday of the week, because in what world is any of this a good idea?
You know, like how every other critical industry operates operates, and how public transportation works in countries that don't shut it down once a week.
All drivers get two days a week off, one of them being their preference for Friday/Saturday/Sunday and the other not.
If a place ~90% shuts down on a particular day, running a skeleton service with limited staff may not be viable due to the fact that most of the infra needs to be nearly 100% operational to support skeleton crews and vehicles.
And also it may involve lot of planning to run skeleton operations (for all you know 10% of the users are sprinkled all over the grid - so which all routes you run the skeleton service, at what frequency etc.).
However in this example ,religious conflict is much much more nuanced and "precious" to people than most other forms of conflict since religion is a life long dedication.
It would look a lot more like regional conflicts without $1 billion each fighter jets.
Iron Dome, drones and other technology prove this can be handled regionally without the need for a single advanced fighter jet, ballistic missile submarine, or any of these other frankly absurd expenditures.
The work force dedicated to these (admittedly very impressive) weapons of war would have to focus their skills elsewhere.
Peace is what the United States has had with Vietnam since 1975.
How can we understand that, when the reason for going to war, at the cost of 58,000 American lives, was that without an intervention, the domino theory predicted that the world order would inevitably collapse?
It didn't.
Vietnam, notwithstanding the pandemic, is a tourist destination where 18 year old American kids have the time of their live in complete safety.
Money for peace would investigate this outcome with the aim of advancing our theoretical knowledge so we might get it right next time, in time to avoid conflict.
Also the Communists were quite open about their plans for world domination.
Are you saying the West was unable to distinguish between Hitler and other world leaders, 20 years later? That sounds like a cognitive bias, akin to PTSD. Surely it would be better for the world to develop therapies for that cognitive bias instead of going to war.
> Also the Communists were quite open about their plans for world domination.
Didn't the Russians defeat Hitler, at the cost of 22 million Russian casualties?
What plans for world domination are you referring to?
Can you point to any act of armed aggression by the Russians against a Western government?
Can you point to any act of armed aggression by the Chinese Communist Part against a western government?
Stalin was almost every bit as bad as Hitler and outlasted him by almost a decade.
Others were just as bad just less "successful".
Also, after a painful lesson in dealing with mad dictators I'm actually glad the west didn't forget the lesson so fast.
> Didn't the Russians defeat Hitler, at the cost of 22 million Russian casualties?
I give you this, this is partially true:
They absolutely played a huge part in it but were themselves saved by Churchill after doing the same blunder as the west: trusting Hitler.
> What plans for world domination are you referring to?
Please do read up on the history of international Communism and Socialism.
> Can you point to any act of armed aggression by the Russians against a Western government?
Besides numerous proxy wars, occupying half of Europe, and, more recently starting a war against Ukraine and shooting down MH-17?
> Can you point to any act of armed aggression by the Chinese Communist Part against a western government?
They haven't dared that quite yet as far as I know but they've broken the agreement with Britain about Hong Kong quite thoroughly, they keep stealing fish (note: the west has also been guilty of this).
What do you know about the history behind the "agreement with Britain about Hong Kong"?
I'm advocating investing in peace.
You seem to be saying the bad guys were bent on taking over the world, so the good guys were justified in going to war to stop them.
If it were that simple, war would be inevitable, and killing all the bad guys would fix the problem once and for all.
But the history of conflict is more complicated than that, and you know it. That's why you declined to state the facts you know about Hong Kong, which was a part of a sovereign nation that was invaded by foreign powers and held hostage.
I'm not saying the suppression of freedom in Hong Kong is 2021 is a good thing. If you put it in to context, it is a tit for a 100 year old tat, that was proceeded by the Opium Wars, which I'm happy to discuss with you further, but we'd achieve more by talking about peace.
How do we put an end to infinite rounds of tit for tat that escalate into violence and destruction?
We started off talking about Vietnam, which today is a Communist nation that hosts tourists from all over the western world, as charmingly and enthusiastically as its former coloniser, France.
How can that be?
Why isn't Vietnam full of retribution for the deaths and mayhem wrought on it by foreign powers?
If we investigate that, and have the courage to re-think history back to the point where we invaded that country to kill communists so as to promote freedom, what might we learn?
I don't know the answer, because we haven't done the investigation, which would cost a few million and take a few years. Those millions haven't been allocated by any western nation, but their collective budgets for war is in the trillions every year.
Why is that? If we start with that question, we'll be on the way to developing tools for peace.
What even are "tools for peace"?
You might be interested to ask Chuck Feeney. He's no communist. He's an American businessman who made billions out of Duty Free Shopping in Hong Kong. Chuck invented the whole category of Duty Free Shopping at airports, an art he pioneered and mastered.
What did he do with those billions? Well, he didn't buy any Mazerattis, Ferraris, Teslas, penthouses, yachts, movie studios or rocket ships. Those things didn't interest him. The guy was more interested in a different form of happiness, and so he spent the fruits of capitalism chasing peace.
https://www.atlanticphilanthropies.org/insights/insights-boo...
https://layingfoundationsforchange.org/region/viet-nam/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2020/09/15/exclus...
Favorited!
In the end these are jobs programs, as you mention the infamous "military industrial complex". They become part of a nation's economic engine.
The media will fret about deficit spending, healthcare, "socialists", inflation etc. when in reality there are bodies charged with ensuring that all remains sane .... at least on the monetary side (in the US, the Federal Reserve).
Nobody needs a new fighter jet or submarine when a few nations have enough weapons to obliterate civilization 50 times over.
Of course, the problem is how to convince European tax payers to part with the money necessary for this. Particularly as we already have two separate European projects to design next gen fighters, the UK-Italian-Swedish Tempest as well as the French-German-Spanish FCAS. Like herding cats.
I wonder what could be done to reduce the cost of developing a new top of the line fighter? More COTS components? A modular approach, which is certainly much more limited in scope in high-performance aircraft than e.g. in cars?
[1] As for China and Russia, interestingly it seems that China is poised to overtake Russia in combat aircraft development: https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/whitehall...
Only few hundreds, of which much less are deployed, given Vanguard, and Triomphant frequent port calls.
Putin, repeatedly, has been shown to be a reliable, and predictable partner - something we cannot really claim about the US, and increasingly less so in recent years.
Putin does not want a strong independent ally next to Russia. He either wants puppet states such as Belarus as allies or a weak and fractured European union. For all the faults the US have they are still better allies than Russia by several lightyears.
Let me rephrase that for you from the perspective of someone who lived on Russia's doorstep for many years.
You mean to say "Maybe if we let Russia subjugate a lot more people and confine them into an evil exploitative system against their will".
That's the big difference between Europe's zone of influence and Russia's zone of influence. People want to be part of the EU (the greatest thing that ever happened to the country I was born in). People want to give their lives to not be part of Russia.
>Putin, repeatedly, has been shown to be a reliable, and predictable partner
Oh come on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrb%C4%9Btice_ammunition_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_bounty_program
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Montenegrin_coup_d%27%C3%...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_independence_movement#...
and many other gigs!
The most effective things you can do is to not force spreading the work across specific companies and countries, and not change the specs as the program goes.
Not signing up for the same currency, the same fishing laws, the same legislations on trade, borders, etc, does not mean you cannot team up with a few other countries on topics of interest.
In the light of its rekindling with the US and Australia this week, I doubt that will be appreciated.