European Politico-economics QA Mega-thread - Page 121

On June 17 2015 01:17 Simberto wrote:
I have no idea either, but the same argument could have been made for Ukraine a few years back, and look where we are now.

answering those questions require information about actual war planning military and political. has nothing to do with your generalities based on fantasized historical principles.

Needless to say, such a scenario is unthinkable, and militarily unpredictable because no war on such a scale has been fought since 1945, and no military doctrine has been developed to cover such terrae incognitae.

...

The question is senseless, and so is this discussion when placed in a conceptual vacuum.

On June 16 2015 22:51 MoltkeWarding wrote:
oneofthem is wrong, as always.

Anyhow, the present rhetoric of imposing costs upon Russia makes her less responsive to our demands, not more. Somewhere along the way, the school of White House game theorists has dropped the instruction manual and picked up a cosmetics kit.

Covert and political warfare of the Dulles-CIA school has had an auspicious run; its reputation embellished by a superhuman mythos that its strategic and moral shortcomings do not receive the attention they deserve. Its key tactic is to elude moral responsibility by the drawing up of uncoordinated punitive laundry list measures against the purported target, and its consequences are entirely unplanned, and therefore inherently chaotic. Why this form of warfare when it is useless? As Aristotle explains in Poetics, the action in theatre is not being performed on the stage, but in the souls of the audiences.

On June 17 2015 00:54 oneofthem wrote:
basic idea is the utter superiority of u.s. conventional military capability vs russian.

it is also very rich of you to talk of moral responsibility when the issue is whether nato can resist russian aggression.

i expect a 2000 word essay defending the retarded position that russia will attack a nato state

On June 16 2015 06:02 lord_nibbler wrote:
And you are not thinking through your own scenario! What do you think will happen if one side in this so-called conventional war was actually close to 'winning'? You can't kill thousands of Russians and still expect them to not press the button 'in the name of humanity' for example.

Yes, a likely scenario would play out like this. But here is the thing, there is no 'outside civil war'. Separatists are part of that country's population too! Choosing sides in a civil war is not what a defensive alliance should be involved in. It should not be about helping the leadership of a member country maintaining its control over the entirety of its population by violent means.

It was you who claimed it was. So why are you arguing with me?




PS:

On June 16 2015 21:47 MoltkeWarding wrote:
Taiguchi does not actually understand the Credit Default Swaps he is citing to support his leitmotif that every nation acted out of a parochial self-interest during this crisis (in contrast, presumably, to his pan-European idealism.) Credit Default Swaps are insurance schemes paid by debt holders to protect themselves against certain credit events, such as defaults. In case of a Greek sovereign debt default, the creditors of the Greek government would have been reimbursed their losses by the institution from which their insurance was purchased; that is to say, CDS redistributes the burdens of default without compounding the total sum of the loss, except in terms of money already paid by the insurees to cover themselves.

When CDS was actually triggered by the de facto default in the haircut deal, it was discovered that both the range and the value of CDS on Greek bonds were negligible, the payouts being barely equivalent to 2% of the losses sustained. So Taiguchi is using evidence whose nature he does not understand to defend an opinion he has already renounced. Voltaire once said that wars go on for the simple reason that they began. So much truer for our loyalty to our own falsehoods.

As for Russia, it is not war, but brinkmanship which is mostly threatening to the European peoples, and I do not only mean this fratricidal confrontation between two portions of a collectively shrinking Western Civilisation; I speak in more prophetic terms. It is important to understand that long after the Americans are absconded from Europe, and NATO relegated to the rust of time, there will remain a handful of Balts and Finns standing between the East Slavs, in their weary hundred millions, and the European seas. At some point, these historically vulnerable peoples will no longer be able to seek their safety in the pretense of being the vanguard of a Western military system; they must rely on their own merits as independent small nations in coping with the realities of their position in the world, a reality which demands prudence, respect, and self-restraint vis-a-vis their greater neighbours.

Collective security on the NATO basis is inherently unsustainable, and may only be secure assuming the predominance of a hegemonic interest within the alliance (the Warsaw Pactisation of NATO) or under temporary conditions of real collective crises. The real precursor to NATO was the interwar petite entente system, and that system is worth comparing, at least in its broad outlines, to the one which prevails in Europe today. In one fundamental respect at least, the weakness exists on the conceptual level: their respective unspoken purposes of converting momentary political advantages into permanent geopolitical features at the expense of rival great powers are purposes quickly undone by the passing of time. The thing that holds NATO together today is not the threat of real conflict, but the absence of real conflict.

That NATO has proven to be less than a political-military monolith is anyhow an event of personal satisfaction. It is not out of cowardice that I never saw the wisdom in pouring Canadian money and lives into subduing Pashtun tribes in Kandahar, to avenge the deaths of a few thousand Americans, or never understood where our national interests are being served in sustaining a war so stupid, that after 14 years we are unable to articulate what we are actually fighting for. NATO is the spirit of Taiguchi haunting the rational world.

On June 18 2015 00:58 Rassy wrote:


Omg that list is hilarious.
Its kinda funny, the higher the living standard in a country,the less the people are prepared to fight for it, and the lower the standard, the more the people are willing to fight for it and defend it.

Its a very interesting chart with lots of information,can be interpreted in many ways.
Don't think it is that accurate though, its just that in many countrys we can not even imagine having to fight for the existence of our country. I think when there where troops at the border more people would be prepared.
15% is frightening and shamefully low lol
(btw I guess its percentage of all adults, or is it percentage of all male adults?)

On June 18 2015 01:16 Rassy wrote:
Hmm yes, we realy have no excuse.
Still its a weird list, to see japan at the bottom and then Netherlands and Germany. Not surprised to see the Netherlands there but Germany and japan?
So much has changed since ww2 and the suicide zeros,can a populations mentality realy change that much?

On June 18 2015 01:16 Rassy wrote:
Hmm yes, we realy have no excuse.
Still its a weird list, to see japan at the bottom and then Netherlands and Germany. Not surprised to see the Netherlands there but Germany and japan?
So much has changed since ww2 and the suicide zeros,can a populations mentality realy change that much?

On June 17 2015 01:27 MoltkeWarding wrote:


Such an utter superiority does not exist; since the US military's conventional offensive capabilities which would enable her to conduct large-scale forced entry into enemy territory is oriented against third-rate powers, not a traditional great power.

On June 17 2015 01:27 MoltkeWarding wrote:
In the case of a defensive war, Russia does not have to match American power projection capabilities in a symmetrical fashion; she merely needs to extend a credible area-denial capability into the operational areas to achieve what she considers "strategic parity," in accordance with her 2010 military doctrine. Strategic parity does not require tit for tat firepower, it merely requires capabilities sophisticated enough to deny the enemy the ability to impose his military-political objectives in a specific theatre. Needless to say, such a scenario is unthinkable, and militarily unpredictable because no war on such a scale has been fought since 1945, and no military doctrine has been developed to cover such terrae incognitae.

On June 17 2015 01:27 MoltkeWarding wrote:
The discussion about whether NATO could resist Russian aggression is pointless, because actual events never follow the trajectory of military planning, particularly not in a military confrontation which has a rational classical foundation as "politics by other means," and especially not when capping the sliding scale of military escalation can only be attained via mutual agreement. In other words, the political objectives of such purported "aggression" become the paramount factor, both in the moral sense and in the physical sense, since total war is absurd. The questions behind the question in this case is more interesting than the questions behind the answers.

On June 18 2015 01:29 Liquid`Drone wrote:
it makes perfect sense to me that the higher living standard the less willing people are to go to war for their country. Higher living standard means you have more to lose.

But the most important thing I garnered from that list is that whether soldiers of the past are portrayed heroically or not makes a world of difference.

Also, if I were asked 'would you be willing to fight for your country' and my options were 'yes' or 'no' then I don't know what I would answer because it depends entirely on the war. If somehow we lived in some type of parallel universe and Norway was attacked by a merely slightly stronger force who wanted go take our land and women and sack our cities and drink our oil, and where our forces would face off in open combat and where numbers would thus be a necessity to win this defensive war to protect our values, valuables and people, then sure. Sign me up.

However, if we say, were to be invaded by a force as much stronger as us as say, Germany in 1940, it's not so easy. Then I would know that fighting would most likely equate to death, and that not fighting would most likely equate to a somewhat worse life than I had before. And then - that's being Norwegian. Our military champions of yore are actually very highly regarded.

And then, if I were instead German, the question 'would you be willing to fight for your country' would immediately make me think 'would you be willing to invade neighboring countries for lebensraum while genociding a little along the way?' - and I'm surprised 18% said yes to that. (then again, I assume they didn't read the question the same way. )

Still - I do find it pretty terrible that so many would not support our countries joining in to defend NATO allies in the face of a Russian invasion. Firstly, because that looks like a really good version of the first scenario - an outsider invading force of vastly inferior power that would, historically, make life for the invadees significantly worse. Secondly, because a military alliance like NATO is a lot like having a security system for your house. It's not like you're likely to need it, but the fact that it is there is so deterring that it ends up being even way less likely that it'll have to be used.

All that said though, Russia isn't attacking any nato countries. However, this is probably not a good time and age for countries within Russia's sphere of influence to openly speak of a desire to join nato.

Taiguchi is more or less right in what he wrote about the crisis and the cdf,s on page 119 of this thread.
And most of the cds did not trigger at all during the debt restructuring due to a special ruling.

Not true. Although there was to an extent a reorientation of sorts when Robert Gates put emphasis on the need for the U.S. military to focus more on counterinsurgency than it did before (including with regards to the kind of weapon systems being developed), he maintained the need to be prepared for conventional warfare against major powers such as Russia and China - and so have the U.S. secretaries of defense that followed his departure. Rising tensions in the Pacific area with China have given further incentive to analyze these powers' capabilities and plan accordingly. This is not to say that war erupting and ground invasion happening is considered to be a likely scenario, but the U.S. is more than capable of inflicting to Russia the kind of "unacceptable harm" that oneofthem mentioned, without the need to occupy Russian territory.,

[Etc.]

That's a really terrible analogy, I think - with NATO structured and behaving like it is - it's a security system that makes war much more likely, reasons given above. A security system is a tool, it is not conscious, it can't make decisions and it costs virtually nothing once installed. A better analogy might be a dog, at least that might cost 2% of household income.

Your name notwithstanding, you seem to be unfamiliar with military planning, since military planning does take into account political factors - for example possible political objectives to be achieved, or a political framework constraining military action (for example, the refusal to use nuclear weapons, or the necessity to avoid bombing, or possibly violating the airspace of, adjacent countries).

On June 18 2015 08:21 warding wrote:
Moltke cited an online Hearts of Iron game 8 years ago to call me a coward. Those were the days....

Do you still have that saved game?

On June 16 2015 22:51 MoltkeWarding wrote:
oneofthem is wrong, as always.

Anyhow, the present rhetoric of imposing costs upon Russia makes her less responsive to our demands, not more. Somewhere along the way, the school of White House game theorists has dropped the instruction manual and picked up a cosmetics kit.

Covert and political warfare of the Dulles-CIA school has had an auspicious run; its reputation embellished by a superhuman mythos that its strategic and moral shortcomings do not receive the attention they deserve. Its key tactic is to elude moral responsibility by the drawing up of uncoordinated punitive laundry list measures against the purported target, and its consequences are entirely unplanned, and therefore inherently chaotic. Why this form of warfare when it is useless? As Aristotle explains in Poetics, the action in theatre is not being performed on the stage, but in the souls of the audiences.