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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   26704 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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Does the US need a large army at all? A small high-tech army is good enough if your goal is to topple foreign governments, it's annexing nearby countries that requires a large body of infantry. The US isn't going to send a million men into the P.R. of China or even Iran, it isn't going to start another Mexican-American War either.

They need a large army to repress the domestic population in case shit hits the fan. "Political power grows out of a barrel of a gun" at the end of the day.

No, they don’t, using the army for internal police has historically failed. It didn’t work for Britain in NI, it didn’t save the Soviet Union, and honestly the colonels are the ones who you need to worry about when SHTF, because that’s prime time for military coups(if the US is even intact still; state governments have militaries, resources, and territorial control beyond the dreams of the feds).

What you need to oppress heartlanders is a much, much, much larger FBI. That’s currently not in the cards.

It could have worked for Britain in NI if Britain had been willing to kill large numbers of people, but - probably out of a mix of knowing that the PR hit would be gruesome (for example, the US has many influential Irish who would have been upset) and maybe also some genuine morality - it wasn't.

In the late 1980s/early 1990s, the Soviet Union didn't seriously try to hold itself together through military force. For the most part and in most places, its military units just stood aside and did nothing while the system slowly unraveled. There was little political will to try to use force to preserve the regime. If there had been, I am not sure if the attempt would have succeeded, but there wasn't anyway so we never got to find out.

But in that case, how much of the failure to recruit the "traditional warrior caste" OP talks about is a benefit, rather than a problem? As a commenter at Jim's blog recently put it:

People who say the military of today is worse than the military of 2000 don’t know the metrics that GAE values: which military is more likely to obey orders to carpet bomb Omaha, NE?

Toppling foreign governments requires massive militaries. It is if anything the most man-power intensive form of war. Firing a few multi-million dollar missiles from platforms that cost hundreds of millions of dollars isn't going to knock out Iran. Even if a small force rolled into Tehran, they wouldn't be able to control more than a tiny area. Afghanistan required US troops in every valley in the country to be won.

How many governments has the US toppled by shipping hundreds of thousands of infantrymen abroad since WWII? Iraq required less than 200k, as did Afghanistan.

How many governments has the US toppled by shipping hundreds of thousands of infantrymen abroad since WWII?

Two, but it was more of a "temporarily threatened" and less of a "toppling".

Funny, because I think we've had this exact debate over whether air power alone can win wars the last time exuberance about being able to kill people remotely got to people.

AI will just lead to a rehash. At least until the robots can do a passable job as filthy occupiers.

I think the point is that the US isn’t going to overthrow the Iranian government. It’s not viable. In the same way, it was only “viable” to overthrow Saddam because the Baathists were a Sunni minority ruling over a largely Shia population who were ultimately happy to see him go (and who are now in charge).

Regime change works when a huge proportion of the population wants it and the US intervenes in their favor. Even Afghanistan had substantial and longstanding domestic opposition to the Taliban. The only other option is a government so sclerotic that it just crumpled under the slightest real pressure. Cuba would probably just collapse if the US invaded, but again it isn’t really worth it now.

The US could certainly overthrow the Iranian government; a government cannot govern if every time an official pops his head up to make a proclamation he gets a bullet in it. What the US couldn't do is replace it with anything better.

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