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Paying 200,000 guys 200,000 a year would cost 40 billion. Europe could easily afford that.
It’s funny, I came up with that exact number estimate in my head just before I saw that comment. But yes, I fully agree.
There are more than enough 19 year old kids in Europe with nothing to lose who spend their days in the gym and scrolling who would 100% take €200k to go to war.
Hell, it might work. Who knows.
I feel like I heard about a proposal that the US military radical reduce force size, essentially becoming a force of all-elite soldiers who are highly trained and highly paid. Just get rid of everything except the tip of the spear, and if shit ever hit the fan, they could rapidly train civilians like what happened in World War II. I think it's a good proposal, and I'd have no problem paying Army Rangers and Navy SEALS $200k a year.
The 19 year old British TikTok enthusiast however is decidedly not that. And would probably be worthless as a soldier, at least at until they're blooded. If they're doing it for the money, do the still get paid if they have a stomach bug and missed the big battle?
But who knows, maybe in ten years we won't need soldiers anyway, and China will just swarm the skies over any city they want with 10 billion drones who can hunt and kill anyone they want to.
Where do you think navy seals come from? They’re ordinary enlisted sailors who pass seal training.
More to the point, military logistics demands skilled labor in quantities and deployability that the civilian world doesn’t. There’s dozens, maybe hundreds, of individual highly technical niche fields where you learn by joining the army/navy, which handles the(lengthy) training pipeline, and then finding a civilian job once you’re out. There is no civilian pipeline to produce these necessary-for-the-military jobs, and they’re not exactly quick to train. You have them in your peacetime army or you don’t have them.
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The "tooth-to-tail ratio" has been pretty low for a long time, since the advent of mechanized warfare. There are always food fights as to what the right number "should" be, and it's unlikely that anyone is going to solve that problem in a few comments on the internet. For the purposes of this comment, I'll take it as mostly a given that, when you actually go to war, you probably need something in the historical range. The question then becomes whether you can successfully and rapidly train civilians to perform all of those other tasks. I would guess probably not. I don't have super precise reasons that I can enumerate; I'm mostly just going on a background feeling that I got from when I listened to a bunch of this podcast, which is all about one of the big training centers.
So what happens there is that they have some folks stationed there who comprise a "red force"; they play the "bad guys". Then, another group of folks (I believe brigade-sized) show up and they set up a scenario and have a big fight ("fake" fight, with equipment like this to help judge when someone is declared magically dead). The US has a lot of brigades, so it's not like they're all down there all the time. You might train and do stuff mostly at your home station, and then every few years or whatever, your brigade will get a slot to go down there and test out your training, see how you do, see what works and what doesn't work so well.
The sense that I got is that a lot of the problems are not, "We don't have enough exquisitely-trained elite soldiers." They're operational stuff. How do you actually get people and equipment to where they need to go? How do you make sure resupplies happen when needed? How do you reorient to new information/objectives? How do you handle CASEVAC so that your teeth can get back to biting? (I've heard that the expectation is that with the move to LSCO, they're expecting significantly higher casualty rates and significantly higher strain on CASEVAC operations, which have to sync well with the teeth.) How do you manage equipment breakdowns? Etc.
It's easy to think that it's easy to just train someone to plan out logistics or to just drive a pile of stuff from one place to another or to pick up a casualty and take them somewhere safe and so on and so forth, but my sense is that getting all that stuff right is actually really really hard. I'm sure they also have plenty of lessons learned and lists of things that didn't work well on the level of the small groups of elite shooters (which they probably just don't talk about on a public podcast), but my sense is that all of these other things are actually important in order for the shooters to be able to do their jobs... and that these other things are actually kind of hard, that they don't "just happen", and that there's a reason that they bring the entire brigade to these events so that they can test their training and make sure the tail is well-oiled enough that the teeth can bite.
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