This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Why is everyone so obsessed with military spending, especially as a % of GDP?
We constantly hear complaints that Europe isn't meeting its 2% defence spending targets. Or Trump wants them to reach 5%.
Defence spending is a basically meaningless number that has only a very tenuous relationship with capabilities, which actually matter. The Taliban did not outspend America in Afghanistan. North Korea could thrash Australia (our defence budget approaches 60-70% of North Korean GDP according to those who invent these numbers) in a war. They have ICBMs and H-bombs, we could barely reach them and couldn't do any damage. Russia has a smaller economy than Italy according to the GDP calculators. But in terms of capabilities...
What is it that Europe needs that they don't have? Ammunition? Then build ammunition factories. Shell factories should be cheap, this is WW2-era technology. Drones? Then build drone factories. Defence spending seems to usually translate into ludicrously expensive purchases of equipment from the United States, which is why the Americans want it constantly raised.
In reality Europe doesn't need any additional militarization. The European half of NATO has about 2 million troops, a population of about 600 million. If Russia is struggling to burn through Ukraine's male fighting age population, how are they supposed to cut down 20x more? How is Russia supposed to man a frontline from Turkey to Finland? How is Russia supposed to contest huge navies with submarines and aircraft carriers? How is Russia supposed to deal with large and powerful air forces, Eurofighters and F-35s? Why would Russia attack such a gigantic, powerful, nuclear-armed alliance?
The European half of NATO alone has the power to smash Russia's conventional forces and force them to fall back on nuclear weapons, where they Russia has a considerable superiority. No additional militarization is needed. There's plenty of room for defence cuts, unless Europe plans on helping the US fight China, nuclear war with Russia or further wrecking in the Middle East.
Talk of defence spending should be wound down and replaced by talk of what specific capabilities are needed to achieve specific objectives. Is it necessary to build fortifications in Lithuania? Do airbases need to be hardened against drones? Anything but 'lets throw billions of dollars in the general direction of these schlerotic military bureaucracies that consistently fail to deliver success'.
This is a joke, right?
Dollars spent isn't the only determinant of a nation's fighting power, but it's the ground-truth for a lot of important factors. How do you think the Allies won WW2? It was by having more tanks + planes + ships (and also oil).
The problem with Europe's defending against Russia is that the countries don't really want to raise defense spending at all, which limits their political appetite for defending their neighbors. Russia wouldn't need to invade the entirety of Europe all at once, they'd just salami-slice e.g. the Baltics and hope other European countries don't get their act together to oppose them. Each European country basically treats all the other countries to their east as buffer states.
Spending is irrelevant. The Allies won WW2 because of capabilities, not expenditure. Europe already spends a lot more than Russia does, yet this spending isn't translating into Europe performing well. The UK and Germany alone spent more in 2023, according to the dollar figures. But they're not stronger than Russia by themselves.
The problem is not 'Europe is not spending enough', which implies that Russia is somehow outspending Europe. They are not. European NATO is spending about $400 billion a year, which is far more than enough to defend themselves. It makes zero sense that $400 billion is insufficient to defend against a foe spending about $100 billion in wartime. It makes zero sense that an alliance of 600 million could be threatened by 140 million.
The problem is that European spending is being allocated wastefully and that European strategy is muddled. Raising defence spending won't fix anything, what's needed is a plan to achieve specific capabilities and integrate them into a broader political strategy.
Adjust those spending figures to PPP and they become quite a bit closer. Europe is spending lots of nominal dollars (or Euros), but those dollars don't go nearly as far in Europe as they would in Russia.
This is certainly another piece of the puzzle. If we could wave a magic wand and make Europe a single country like the USA, then a lot of these issues would be fixed. Reducing duplication and having a clear strategy would be great force-multipliers, but in absence of someone having that magic wand, increasing spending is a much more plausible solution in the short and medium term.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
So Russia has around as nearly as many or more troops (if you count reservists) despite having less than a third of the population?
Have you read about the readiness problems that European countries, in particular Germany, are experiencing? (Also, note that in reality Russia's air force, which is not its strong suit, is larger than the German air force even if we are counting only modern Russian aircraft like the Su-30, Su-35, Su-34, Su-57 and counting German F-35s which haven't been delivered yet. The Russians also have strategic bombers, which no European military possesses. Removing American air power from the picture considerably curtails European capabilities.)
Anyway, I think it's very very clear from Ukraine that Europe needs more artillery production and more mine clearing capabilities. IMHO, while I haven't done the napkin math, the odds of Europe beating Russia on its own are actually not as high as you'd like if they can't sustain artillery production or clear minefields, including minefields that can be laid behind your own lines via rocket.
Yeah they prolly won't. But if the US is sending all its effort to the Pacific, the alliance is much less gigantic, much less powerful, much less nuclear-armed.
I tend to agree with this, tbqh. From my armchair: in specific capabilities, Europe needs to actually have the capacity to produce millions of artillery shells per year, to clear tens of thousands of mines at a minimum, and they need lots of anti-drone capabilities that actually work, they probably need lots of drones/loitering munitions. I don't see any real evidence of this. (They need the artillery shells because artillery is the prime killer on the battlefield and being at a fire disadvantage means they will lose like the Ukrainians are losing; they need the ability to clear thousands of mines because the Russians have millions of mines and if they don't have robust mine clearing capabilities they will not be able to reclaim lost territory; they need anti-drone capabilities to defend their ability to meaningfully maneuver and drones to prevent Russian maneuver formations.)
I am also skeptical about their ability to sustain a prolonged air-to-ground air campaign due to a lack of munitions and inability to defeat Russian counter-PGM surface-to-air missiles, which can target anti-radiation missiles like the HARM. I am likewise skeptical about their ability to defeat Russian cruise and ballistic missiles due to a lack of surface-to-air missiles – e.g. Germany has only 7 Patriot batteries as per Wikipedia – which, if you assume 4 launchers with 8 missiles per, means they can optimistically defend against about 200 missiles before running dry and needing to be reloaded; Russia has supposedly launched mass attacks consisting of about 300 missiles and drones at one time against Ukraine. (They need to be able to defeat Russian SAMS to use aircraft offensively at all, and in particular the Eurofighter, which is not stealthy – which as an aside I think is still largely using a mechanically scanned array, and should for that reason thought of as inferior to modern Flanker variants. They need air-to-ground munitions to make multirole aircraft relevant, they need to be able to defeat Russian cruise missile raids to protect air bases, electrical generation, command posts, etc. I think the reason they need all of this is fairly clear.)
If we're positing a US pull-out of NATO, they need tactical nuclear weapons as well. (They need this because it's unlikely that France or England will be happy about using their strategic arsenal to retaliate if the Russians use a few low-yield tactical nuclear weapons on air bases, ships, entrenched troops, etc.)
Look, I think that Russia is afraid of NATO for a reason, and I don't think it's good to exaggerate their capabilities or overlook their weaknesses. But on the other hand, I don't think now is a time for NATO triumphalism for a reason. Here's the truth about the Russian military right now:
I think Europe should on paper be able to deter Russia successfully. But when it comes to the US out of NATO, or US tied up in the Pacific, I think there's a reason that Europeans are nervous. I do not believe they are ready to defend themselves alone against Russia if Russia wins in Ukraine. This does not imply that Russia has the appetite to attack even an EU-only NATO, or that Russia would defeat the EU. It just means that Europe's security situation, if the US substantially leaves NATO, becomes substantially more precarious because they will be roughly at parity* with Russia instead of having overmatch.
*just going off of troop numbers here, I'm sure I could do some napkin math to see how that stacks up in equipment.
Damn, I did not realise they were only now adding AESA radars on those things, I thought they were half decent! Were they cribbing notes from Indian military procurement? Or did the Indians learn how to design aircraft from Europe and apply those lessons on the Tejas? The Rafales at least have AESA.
Yes tactical nukes are one field where I think there's a real case for further development. Poland's conventional forces won't be much good if Russia starts vaporizing them and demanding unconditional surrender, trusting that France and Britain won't risk their own infrastructure.
But it seems unlikely that either party would take such risks. Does Russia really want to subjugate some extremely unruly and recently irradiated Poles? Why would they so greatly desire to conquer the tiny Baltic states? There are potential strategic gains but huge risks.
And Europe's population is so high that they can afford to buy time with hundreds of thousands, millions of lives in low tech, defensive trench warfare. They might have readiness problems, they might have shortages of this and that. But they're so big that they have the time and space to fix this stuff and fight a long war. Russia does not have the blitzkrieg capabilities to reach the European industrial core before they can militarize. Bombing Ukraine is one thing but Russian PGM production surely isn't sufficient to bomb out the combined military industry of Europe.
Well, they can carry the Meteor, which is something. There's a possibility radar will be if not obsolete then somewhat more limited in utility in World War III than it was in prior wars, so perhaps it won't be as much of a handicap as it seems.
But yes, the fact that they are apparently still running around with mechanically scanned arrays does not inspire me with confidence in Europe's military readiness.
Bingo.
Well it's interesting, I had the chance to speak to a former KGB officer about Russia's geopolitical situation once. (This would have been about a decade ago.) He told me that due to USSR central planning - which distributed various parts of Soviet industry to various SSRs, essentially specializing specific regions - Russia wanted to essentially reintegrate its old economy that was cleft from it by the fall of the USSR. Now, I don't think this necessarily needs to involve force - you'll notice that Russia did not start coercive measures against Ukraine [which is in any event more important in Russian consciousness than Latvia or Poland] until Ukraine started attempting to disentangle itself economically from Russia. Even after 2014, the Ukrainian arms industry continued to deliver arms to the Russian military as Soviet central planners had intended.
And of course there's always the intense Russian desire to put more space between Moscow and potential hostiles.
Now, I don't think Poland or Latvia are nearly as emotionally central or economically important to Russia as Ukraine is. It's also been a couple of decades and Russia has been able to develop their own internal industry. I tend to agree that going after Poland or even Latvia is unlikely while they have NATO protection. But on the other hand, I was a little surprised (although not shocked) when they went into Ukraine.
I think the concerns most people have are a bit more limited than "reaching the European industrial core," it's things like carving a land bridge to Kaliningrad and NATO being unwilling or unable to fix the problem after the blitzkrieg (which wouldn't need to drive more than 200 miles or so through the weakest NATO members).
On a quick Google, Russia launched more than 10,000 missiles between 2022 and 2024. Wikipedia says the
ShahedGeran-2 has a possible maximum 1,600 mile range which, if true, means Russia could hit targets in France even without staging from Belarus. A more conservative estimate of 600 miles merely threatens Poland. Russia looks to be able to make at least 6,000 a year, plus 10,000 decoy drones to screen them. And the Geran is bottom-shelf technology, cheap built stuff for mass attacks. For a more top-end option, consider the Kh-101 cruise missile (range of 2000 miles or so) and Russia is supposed to be able to make about 100 per month on wartime footing.So in other words, if you assume Russia gets two years of respite at current production levels they could probably have a theoretical opening day salvo of 12,000 Gerans, 20,000 decoy attack drones, and maybe 2,500 "conventional" cruise missile, of just those two types alone.
Obviously Russia may not continue wartime production after Ukraine winds down. However on the other hand their production might be so high during the war, should it continue, that even winding it down to nominal peacetime levels afterwards leaves them with stockpiles of thousands.
Anyway I do not believe that all of NATO could intercept nearly 35,000 targets even if they were fired piecemeal. On the other hand, 10,000 missiles isn't necessarily as devastating as it sounds when split across a large enough target set (as Ukraine shows - although I believe Ukraine has access to plenty of old Soviet hardened industrial sites and I am not sure if Germany is quite so hardened). I doubt even a 10,000 missile salvo can totally destroy all relevant European military industry, but I confess I don't have a good idea of how large a target set that would be. But definitely I can imagine a force like that being capable of a series of week-one salvos on the order of "kill thousands of sleeping troops in garrison" or "delete the Polish air force and navy in port" or "destroy dozens of major ammo depots and vehicle servicing facilities."
More options
Context Copy link
I think that’s a scenario that Europe needs to think about hard given that a lot of old Soviet war plans (like Seven Days to the Rhine) explicitly call for massive nuclear strikes on peripheral NATO countries while avoiding nuclear strikes on Britain and France to give them an out. As for your irritated Polish clay point, there are pretty good strategic reasons to seize the Baltic States and Poland, that’s what gets them the Sulwaki Gap choke point, probably Russia’s most logical post-GDR defensive barrier against NATO.
Regarding your last point, most Western European countries might have serious internal stability problems calling up huge conscript armies, given the religious and ethnic demographic makeup of the military aged males they would be arming.
But where is the logic in launching such an ambitious invasion?
Why would you invade NATO so you can defend against NATO from mildly more advantageous geography?
Because they are in demographic decline and they’re thinking about how they are going to defend their border 40 years from now.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Conscripting the fighting aged males from a poorly assimilated minority and throwing them into the meatgrinder is a solution to a problem, not a cause of social instability per se.
Until they decide they would rather not get frog-marched off to die in a trench in Ukraine and decide that Tiocfaidh ár lá might in fact refer to today.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link